[HN Gopher] A Research Preview of Codex
___________________________________________________________________
A Research Preview of Codex
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 482 points
Date : 2025-05-16 15:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| haffi112 wrote:
| (watching live) I'm wondering how it performs on the METR
| benchmark (https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-
| to-com...).
| colesantiago wrote:
| I think the benchmark test for these programming agents that I
| would like to see an Agent making a flawless PR or patch to the
| BSD / Linux kernel.
|
| This should be possible today and surely Linus would also see
| this in the future.
| _kb wrote:
| There's a fairly pragmatic discussion in that exact topic with
| Linus here: https://youtu.be/VHHT6W-N0ak.
| tptacek wrote:
| Maddening: "codex" is also the name of their open-source Claude-
| Code-alike, and was previously the name of an at-the-time
| frontier coding model. It's like they name things just to fuck
| with us.
| tekacs wrote:
| So -- that client-side thing is _technically_ called `codex-
| cli` (in the parent 'codex' repo, which looks like a
| monorepo?).
|
| Still super confusing, though!
|
| I feel like companies working with and shipping LLMs would do
| well to remember that it's not just humans who get confused by
| this, but LLMs themselves... it makes for a painful time,
| sending off a request and noting that a third of the way into
| its reasoning that the model has gotten tow things with almost-
| identical names confused.
| tough wrote:
| they also have a dual implementation on rust and typescript
| there's codex-rs in that monorepo
| fabmilo wrote:
| more excited about the rust impl than the typescript one.
| tptacek wrote:
| Besides packaging of their releases, what possible
| difference could that make in this problem domain?
| tough wrote:
| I just think it's nice to have open source code to
| reference so maybe he meant just in that -educational-
| way, certainly more to learn from the rust one than the
| TS one for most folks? even if the problem-space doesn't
| require system-level safety code indeed
| quantadev wrote:
| If it's name is 'codex-cli' then that means "Codex Command
| Line Interface" so the name is absolutely codex.
| manojlds wrote:
| And with themselves and their models. The Codex open source had
| prompt to disambiguate it from the model.
| scottfalconer wrote:
| Next week: OpenAI rebrands Windsurf as Codex.
| odie5533 wrote:
| Codex IDE. Calling it.
| dbbk wrote:
| VS Codex
| prhn wrote:
| Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?
|
| I'm very interested.
|
| In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at
| these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not
| saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an
| LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.
|
| These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and
| pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts
| that save me time here and there. That's it.
|
| And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It
| generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time
| auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.
|
| That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code
| base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in
| less time than it takes to review for expected errors.
|
| What am I missing?
| icapybara wrote:
| It's probably what you're asking. You can't just say "write me
| an app", you have to break a big problem into small problems
| for it.
| spariev wrote:
| I think it all depends on your platform and use cases. In my
| experience AI tools work best with Python and JS/Typescript and
| some simple use cases (web apps, basic data science etc). Also,
| I've found they can be of great help with refactorings and
| cases when you need to do something similar to already existing
| code, but with a twist or change.
| volkk wrote:
| you might be missing small things to create more guardrails
| like effective prompting and maintaining what's been done using
| files, carefully controlling context, committing often in-
| between changes, but largely, you're not missing anything. i
| use AI constantly, but always for subtasks of a larger
| complicated thing that my brain has thought through. and often
| use higher cost models to help me abstractly think through
| complex things/point me in the right directions.
|
| personally, i've always operated in a codebase in a way that i
| _need_ to understand how things work for me to be productive
| and make the right decisions. I operate the same way with AI.
| every change is carefully reviewed, if it's dumb, i make it
| redo it and explain why it's dumb. and if it gets caught in a
| loop, i reset the context and try to reframe the problem.
| overall, i'm definitely more productive, but if you truly want
| to be hands off--you're in for a very bad time. i've been
| there.
|
| lastly, some codebases don't work well with AI. I was working
| on a problem that was a bit more novel/out there and no model
| could solve it. Just yapped endlessly about these complex, very
| potentially smart sounding solutions that did absolutely
| nothing. went all the way to o1-pro. the craziest part to me
| was the fact that across claude, deepseek and openai, they used
| the same specific vernacular for this particular problem which
| really highlights how a lot of these models are just a mish-
| mash of the same underlying architecture/internet data. some of
| these models use responses from other models for their training
| data, which to me is like incest. you won't get good genetical
| results
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >What am I missing?
|
| That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling
| codebase feature packed software packages that define the
| modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any one
| user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given day.
| Software is written to accommodate every need every user could
| have in one package. Then the users just use the small slice
| that accommodates their specific needs.
|
| I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used daily
| by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my company
| is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We are a tiny
| company that does old school manufacturing.
|
| To give a quick general example, Betty uses Excel to manage
| payroll. A list of employees, a list of wages, a list of hours
| worked (which she copys from the time clock software .csv that
| she imports to excel).
|
| Excel is a few million LOC program and costs ~$10/mo. Betty
| needs maybe 2k LOC to do what she uses excel for. Something an
| LLM can do easily, a python GUI wrapper on an SQLite DB. And
| she would be blown away at how fast it is, and how it is
| written for her use specifically.
|
| How software is written and how it is used will change to
| accommodate LLMs. We didn't design cars to drive on horse
| paths, we put down pavement.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| The Romans put down paved roads to make their horse paths
| more reliable.
|
| But yes, I hope we get away from the giant conglomeration of
| everything, ESPECIALLY the reality of people doing 90% of
| their business inside a Google Chrome widow. Move towards the
| UNIX philosophy of tiny single-purpose programs.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| > I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used
| daily by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my
| company is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We
| are a tiny company that does old school manufacturing.
|
| OK, great.
|
| > That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling
| codebase feature packed software packages that define the
| modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any
| one user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given
| day. Software is written to accommodate every need every user
| could have in one package. Then the users just use the small
| slice that accommodates their specific needs.
|
| With all due respect, the fact that you made a few small
| programs to help with your tasks is wonderful but this last
| statement alone rather disqualifies your expertise to make an
| assessment on software engineering in general.
|
| There's a great number of reasons why codebases get large.
| Complex problems inherently come with complexity and scale in
| both code and integrations. You can choose to move the
| complexity around but never fully get rid of it.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| But how much of the software industry is truly solving
| inherently complex problems?
|
| At a very conservative guess I'd say no more than 10% (and
| my actual guess would be <1%)
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Occasionally. I find that there is a certain category of task
| that I can hand over to an LLM and get a result that takes me
| significantly less time to clean up than it would have taken me
| to write from scratch.
|
| A recent example from a C# project I was working in. The
| project used builder classes that were constructed according to
| specified rules, but all of these builders were written by
| hand. I wanted to automatically generate these builders, and
| not using AI, just good old meta-programming.
|
| Now I knew enough to know that I needed a C# source generator,
| but I had absolutely no experience with writing them. Could I
| have figured this out in an hour or two? Probably. Did I write
| a prompt in less than five minutes and get a source generator
| that worked correctly in the first shot? Also yes. I then spent
| some time cleaning up that code and understanding the API it
| uses to hook into everything and was done in half an hour and
| still learnt something from it.
|
| You can make the argument that this source generator is in
| itself "boilerplate", because it doesn't contain any special
| sauce, but I still saved significant time in this instance.
| uludag wrote:
| I feel things get even worse when you use a more niche
| language. I get extremely disappointed any time I try to get it
| do anything useful in Clojure. Even as a search engine,
| especially when asking it about libraries, these tools
| completely fail expectation.
|
| I can't even fathom how frustrating such tools would be with
| poorly written confusing Clojure code using some niche
| dependency.
|
| That being said, I can imagine a whole class of problems where
| this could succeed very well at and provide value. Then again,
| the type of problems that I feel these systems could get right
| 99% of the time are problems that a skilled developer could fix
| in minutes.
| sottol wrote:
| I tried using Gemini 2.5 Pro for a side-side-project, seemed
| like a good project to explore LLMs and how they'd fit into my
| workflow. 2-3 weeks later it's around 7k loc of Python auto-
| gerating about 35k loc of C from JSON spec.
|
| This project is not your typical Webdev project, so maybe
| that's an interesting case-study. It takes a C-API spec in
| JSON, loads and processes it in Python and generates a
| C-library that turns a UI marked up YAML/JSON into C-Api calls
| to render that UI. [1]
|
| The result is pretty hacky code (by my design, can't/won't use
| FFI) that's 90% written by Gemini 2.5 Pro Pre/Exp but it mostly
| worked. It's around 7k lines of Python that generate a 30-40k
| loc C-library from a JSON LVGL-API-spec to render an LVGL UI
| from YAML/JSON markup.
|
| I probably spent 2-3 weeks on this, I might have been able to
| do something similar in maybe 2x the time but this is about 20%
| of the mental overhead/exhaustion it would have taken me
| otherwise. Otoh, I would have had a much better understanding
| of the tradeoffs and maybe a slightly cleaner architecture if I
| would have to write it. But there's also a chance I would have
| gotten lost in some of the complexity and never finished (esp
| since it's a side-project that probably no-one else will ever
| see).
|
| What worked well:
|
| * It mostly works(!). Unlike previous attempts with Gemini 1.5
| where I had to spend about as much or more time fixing than
| it'd have taken me to write the code. Even adding complicated
| features after the fact usually works pretty well with minor
| fixing on my end.
|
| * Lowers mental "load" - you don't have to think so much about
| how to tackle features, refactors, ...
|
| Other stuff:
|
| * I really did not like Cursor or Windsurf - I half-use VSCode
| for embedded hobby projects but I don't want to then have
| another "thing" on top of that. Aider works, but it would
| probably require some more work to get used to the automatic
| features. I really need to get used to the tooling, not an
| insignificant time investment. It doesn't vibe with how I work,
| yet.
|
| * You can generate a *significant* amount of code in a short
| time. It doesn't feel like it's "your" code though, it's like
| joining a startup - a mountain of code, someone else's
| architecture, their coding style, comment style, ... and,
|
| * there's this "fog of code", where you can sorta bumble around
| the codebase but don't really 100% understand it. I still have
| mid/low confidence in the changes I make by hand, even 1 week
| after the codebase has largely stabilized. Again, it's like
| getting familiar with someone else's code.
|
| * Code quality is ok but not great (and partially my fault).
| Probably depends on how you got to the current code - ie how
| clean was your "path". But since it is easier to "evolve" the
| whole project (I changed directions once or twice when I sort
| of hit a wall) it's also easier to end up with a messy-ish
| codebase. Maybe the way to go is to first explore, then codify
| all the requirements and start afresh from a clean slate
| instead of trying to evolve the code-base. But that's also not
| an insignificant amount of work and also mental load (because
| now you really need to understand the whole codebase or trust
| that an LLM can sufficiently distill it).
|
| * I got much better results with very precise prompts. Maybe
| I'm using it wrong, ie I usually (think I) know what I want and
| just instruct the LLM instead of having an exploratory chat but
| the more explicit I am, the more closely the output is to what
| I'd like to see. I've tried to discuss proposed changes a few
| times to generate a spec to implement in another session but it
| takes time and was not super successful. Another thing to
| practice.
|
| * A bit of a later realization, but modular code and short,
| self-contained modules are really important though this might
| depend on your workflow.
|
| To summarize:
|
| * It works.
|
| * It lowers initial mental burden.
|
| * But to get really good results, you still have to put a lot
| of effort into it.
|
| * At least right now, it seems you will still eventually have
| to put in the mental effort at some point, normally it's
| "front-loaded" where you have to do the design and think about
| it hard, whereas the AI does all the initial work but it
| becomes harder to cope with the codebase once you reach a
| certain complexity. Eventually you will have to understand it
| though even if just to instruct the LLM to make the exact
| changes you want.
|
| [1] https://github.com/thingsapart/lvgl_ui_preview
| asadm wrote:
| yes, think of it as search engine that auto-applies that
| stackoverflow fix to your code.
|
| But I have done larger tasks (write device drivers) using
| gemini.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've built a number of personal data-oriented and single
| purpose tools in Replit. I've constrained my ambitions to what
| I think it can do but I've added use cases beyond my initial
| concept.
|
| In short, the tools work. I've built things 10x faster than
| doing it from scratch. I also have a sense of what else I'll be
| able to build in a year. I also enjoy not having to add cycles
| to communicate with external contributors -- I think, then I
| do, even if there's a bit of wrestling. Wrangling with a coding
| agent feels a bit like "compile, test, fix, re-compile". Re-
| compiling generally got faster in subsequent generations of
| compiler releases.
|
| My company is building internal business functions using AI
| right now. It works too. We're not putting that stuff in front
| of our customers yet, but I can see that it'll come. We may put
| agents into the product that let them build things for
| themselves.
|
| I get the grumpiness & resistance, but I don't see how it's
| buying you anything. The puck isn't underfoot.
| IXCoach wrote:
| Hey there!
|
| Lots missing here, but I had the same issues, it takes
| iteration and practice. I use claude code in terminal windows,
| and text expander to save explicit reminders that I have to
| inject super regularly because anthropic obscures access to
| system prompts.
|
| For example, I have 3 to 8 paragraph long instructions I will
| place regularly about not assuming, checking deterministically
| etc. and for most things I have the agents write a report with
| a specific instruction set.
|
| I pop the instructions into text expander so I just type - docs
| when saying go figure this out, and give me the path to the
| report when done.
|
| They come back with a path, and I copy it and search vscode
|
| It opens as an md and i use preview mode, its similar to a
| google doc.
|
| And ill review it. always, things will be wrong, tons of
| assumptions, failures to check determistically, etc... but I
| see that in the doc and have it fix it. correct
| misunderstandings, update the doc until its perfect.
|
| From there ill say add a plan in a table with status for each
| task based on this ( another text expander snippet with
| instructions )
|
| And WHEN thats 100% right, Ill say implement and update as you
| go. The update as you go forces it to recognize and remember
| the scope of the task.
|
| Greatest points of failure in the system is misalignment.
| Ethics teams got that right. It compounds FAST if allowed. you
| let them assume things, they state assumptions as facts, that
| becomes what other agents read and you get true chaos
| unchecked.
|
| I started rebuilding claude code from scratch literally because
| they block us from accessing system prompts and I NEED these
| agents to stop lying to me about things that are not done or
| assumed, which highlights the true chaos possible when applied
| to system critical operations in governance or at scale.
|
| I also built my own tool like codex for managing agent tasks
| and making this simpler, but getting them to use it without
| getting confused is still a gap.
|
| Let me know if you have any other questions. I am performing
| the work of 20 Engineers as of today, rewrote 2 years of back
| end code that required a team of 2 engineers full time work in
| 4 weeks by myself with this system... so I am, I guess quite
| good at it.
|
| I need to push my edges further into this latest tech, have not
| tried codex cli or the new tool yet.
| IXCoach wrote:
| Its a total of about 30 snippets, avg 6 paragraphs long, that
| I have to inject. for each role switch it goes through i have
| to re inject them.
|
| its a pain but it works.
|
| Even TDD it will hallucinate the mocks without management.
| and hallucinate the requirements. Each layer has to be
| checked atomically, but the text expander snippets done right
| can get it close to 75% right.
|
| My main project faces 5000 users so I cant let the agents run
| freely, whereas with isolated projects in separate repos I
| can let them run more freely, then review in gitkraken before
| committing.
| Rudybega wrote:
| You could just use something like roo code with custom
| modes rather than manually injecting them. The orchestrator
| mode can decide on the other appropriate modes to use for
| subtasks.
|
| You can customize the system prompts, baseline propmts, and
| models used for every single mode and have as many or as
| few as you want.
| arkmm wrote:
| I think most code these days is boilerplate, though the
| composition of boilerplate snippets can become something unique
| and differentiated.
| evilduck wrote:
| It may depend on what you consider boilerplate. I use them
| quite a bit for scripting outside of direct product code
| development. Essentially, AI coding tools have moved this
| chart's decision making math for me: https://xkcd.com/1205/ The
| cost to automate manual tasking is now significantly lower so I
| end up doing more of it.
| lispisok wrote:
| A lot of people are deeply invested in these things being
| better than they really are. From the OpenAI's and Google's
| spending $100s of billions EACH developing LLMs to VC backed
| startups promising their "AI agent" can replace entire teams of
| white collar employees. That's why your experience matches mine
| and every other developer I personally know but you see
| comments everywhere making much grander claims.
| triMichael wrote:
| I agree, but I'd add that it's not just the tech giants who
| want them to be better than they are, but also non-
| programmers.
|
| IMO LLMs are actually pretty good at writing small scripts.
| First, it's much more common for a small script to be in the
| LLM's training data, and second, it's much easier to find and
| fix a bug. So the LLM actually does allow a non-programmer to
| write correct code with minimal effort (for some simple
| task), and then they are blown away thinking writing software
| is a solved problem. However, these kinds of people have no
| idea of the difference between a hundred line script where an
| error is easily found and isn't a big deal and a million line
| codebase where an error can be invisible and shut everything
| down.
|
| Worst of all is when the two sides of tech-giants and non-
| programmers meet. These two sides may sound like opposites
| but they really aren't. In particular, there are plenty of
| non-programmers involved at the C-level and the HR levels of
| tech companies. These people are particularly vulnerable to
| being wowed by LLMs seemingly able to do complex tasks that
| in their minds are the same tasks their employees are doing.
| As a result, they stop hiring new people and tell their
| current people to "just use LLMs", leading to the current
| hiring crisis.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| TBH, this website in the last few years has attracted an
| increasingly non-technical audience. And the field, in
| general, has attracted a lot of less experienced folks that
| don't understand the implications of what they're doing. I
| don't mean that as a diss-- but just a reflection of reality.
|
| Indeed, even codex (and i've been using it prior to this
| release) is not remotely at the level of even a junior
| engineer outside of a set of tasks.
| kypro wrote:
| Firstly, LLM chat interfaces != agentic coding platforms.
|
| ChatGPT is good for asking questions about languages, SDKs, and
| APIs, or generating boilerplate, but it's useless if you want
| to give an AI a ticket and for it to raise PRs for you.
|
| This is where you need agentic solutions like Codex which will
| be far more useful because they will actually have access to
| your codebase and a dev environment where they can test and
| debug changes.
|
| They still do really dumb things, but a lot of this can be
| avoided if you prompt well and give it the right types of
| problems to solve.
|
| In my experience at the moment there's a sweet spot with these
| agentic coding platforms which makes them useful for semi-
| complicated tasks - assuming you prompt well they can generate
| 90% of the code you need, then you just need to spend the extra
| 10% fixing it up before it's ready for prod.
|
| Tasks too simple (a few lines) it's a waste of time. You spend
| longer prompting and going back and forth with the agent than
| it would take to just make the change yourself.
|
| Then obviously very complicated tasks, especially tasks that
| require some thought around architecture and performance,
| coding agents really struggle with. Less because they can't do
| it, but because for certain problems simply meeting ACs is far
| less important than how the ACs are being met. Ideally here you
| want to get the architecture right first, then once that's in
| place you can break down the remaining work for the AI to pick
| up.
| elyase wrote:
| What you're missing is how to use the tools properly. With
| solid documentation, good project management practices, a well-
| organized code structure and tests, any junior engineer should
| be able to read up on your codebase, write linted code
| following your codebase style, verify it via tests and write
| you a report of what was done, challenges faced etc. State of
| the art coding agents will do that at superhuman speeds.
|
| If you haven't set things up properly (important info lives
| only in people's heads / meetings, tasks dont have clear
| acceptance criteria, ...) then you aren't ready for Junior
| Developers yet. You need to wait until your Coding Agents are
| at Senior level.
| energy123 wrote:
| Where can I read OpenAI's promise that it won't use the repos I
| upload for training?
| alvis wrote:
| Is it surprising? Hmm perhaps nope. But is it better than cursor
| etc? Hmm perhaps it's a wrong question.
|
| Feels like codex is for product managers to fix bugs without
| touching any developer resources. Then it's insanely surprising!
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| It sounds nice, but are product managers able to spot
| regressions or other potential issues (performance, data
| protection, legal, etc) in the codex result?
| alvis wrote:
| If codex can analyze the whole code base, I can't see why
| not? I can even imagine one can set up a CI task that any
| committed code must pass all sort of legal/data protection
| requirements too
| kenjackson wrote:
| Exactly this. In fact the product manager should be the one
| that knows what the set of checks that need to be done over
| the code base. You need a dev though to do make sure the
| last mile is doing what you expect it to do.
| bhl wrote:
| I've been contracting with a startup. The bottleneck is not the
| lack of tools; it's agency. There's so much work, it becomes
| work to assign and organize work.
|
| But now who's going to do that work? Still engineers.
| ilaksh wrote:
| As someone who works on his own open source agent framework/UI
| (https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot), it's kind of interesting
| how announcements from vendors tend to mirror features that I am
| working on.
|
| For example, in the last month or so, I added a job queue plugin.
| The ability to run multiple tasks that they demoed today is quite
| similar. The issue I ran into with users is that without
| Enterprise plans, complex tasks run into rate limits when trying
| to run concurrently.
|
| So I am adding an ability to have multiple queues, with each
| possibly using different models and/or providers, to get around
| rate limits.
|
| By the way, my system has features that are somewhat similar not
| only to this tool they are showing but also things like Manus. It
| is quite rough around the edges though because I am doing 100% of
| it myself.
|
| But it is MIT Licensed and it would be great if any developer on
| the planet wanted to contribute anything.
| asadm wrote:
| Is there an open source version of this? that essentially uses
| microvms to git clone my repo and essentially run codex-cli or
| equivalent and sends me a PR.
|
| I made one for github action but it's not as realtime and is 2
| years old now: https://github.com/asadm/chota
| illnewsthat wrote:
| I haven't checked in on it recently, but maybe a similar open-
| source option would be https://github.com/All-Hands-
| AI/OpenHands
|
| A not open-source option this looks close to is also
| https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace (released
| April 2024, but I'm not sure it's gotten any significant
| updates since)
| asadm wrote:
| oh openDevin became openHANDS. Interestingly, I committed the
| LICENSE file to that repo haha
| tough wrote:
| did they relicense too w the rename?
| asadm wrote:
| no, original MIT still remains yay.
| simianwords wrote:
| I wonder if tools like these are best for semi structured
| refactors like upgrade to python3, migrate to postgres etc
| btbuildem wrote:
| > To balance safety and utility, Codex was trained to identify
| and precisely refuse requests aimed at development of malicious
| software, while clearly distinguishing and supporting legitimate
| tasks.
|
| I can't say I am a big fan of neutering these paradigm-shifting
| tools according to one culture's code of ethics / way of doing
| business / etc.
|
| One man's revolutionary is another's enemy combatant and all
| that. What if we need top-notch malware to take down the robot
| dogs lobbing mortars at our madmaxian compound?!
| amarcheschi wrote:
| If I had to guess, only for the general public they'll be
| neutered, not for the 3 letters agencies
| pixl97 wrote:
| TLA's have very few of their own coders, they contract
| everything out. Now I'm sure OAI will lend an unrestricted
| model to groups that pay large private contracts they won't
| disclose.
| lumenwrites wrote:
| You gotta think about it in terms of cost vs benefit. How much
| damage will a malicious AI do, vs how much value will you get
| out of non-neutered model?
| GolfPopper wrote:
| > _What if we need top-notch malware to take down the robot
| dogs lobbing mortars at our madmaxian compound?!_
|
| I wouldn't sweat it. According to it's developers, Codex
| understands 'malicious software', it has just been trained to
| say, "But I won't do that" when such requests are made to it.
| Judging from the recent past [1][2] getting LLMs to bypass such
| safeguards is pretty easy.
|
| 1.https://hiddenlayer.com/innovation-hub/novel-universal-
| bypas... 2.https://cyberpress.org/researchers-bypass-
| safeguards-in-17-p...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Agreed, I'm a big proponent that people should be in control of
| the tools they use. I don't think the approach where there is
| wise dicator enforcing I can't use my flathead screwdriver to
| screw down a phillips head screw is good. I think it's actively
| undermining people.
| scudsworth wrote:
| pleased to see a paragraph-long comment in the examples. now
| thats good coding.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| More generated slop for a real human to sift through. Can I get
| an ai summary of that comment?
| kleiba wrote:
| Just curious: is your company happy sharing their code-base with
| an AI provider? Or are you using a local installation?
| asadm wrote:
| why not? OpenAI won't be stupid to look at my code and be that
| vulnerable legally. It ain't worth it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| They literally scraped half of youtube, made a library to
| extract the audio and released it as whisper.
|
| Of _course_ they are training on your shit.
| asadm wrote:
| thats publicly accessible shit. my code is trade secret and
| IP. I would litigate that shit if a line I wrote ends up in
| public model, easiest money to be made.
| frontalier wrote:
| you will litigate nothing, and if you do you'll be
| dismissed anyway.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shira_Perlmutter#Firing
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > my code is trade secret and IP
|
| Which is the same law that protects "publicly accessible
| shit".
|
| In the same way that you can't legally just rip MP3s off
| the internet[1], or copy movies and distribute them.
|
| [1] unless you're rich.
| bhl wrote:
| Cursor has enterprise mode which forces a data privacy feature.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Companies commonly share their code with SAAS providers.
| Typically they'll have a contract to prevent usage otherwise.
| nmca wrote:
| It is a cost benefit trade off, as with all things. Benefits
| look pretty good.
| layer8 wrote:
| The cost of sharing your code is unknown, though.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| Under what circumstances would that cost be high? Is OpenAI
| going to rip off your app? Why would they waste a second on
| that when there are better models to be built?
| odie5533 wrote:
| For 99% of companies, their code is worthless to anyone but
| them.
| manquer wrote:
| For copying the product / service yes it is not worth much .
|
| However for people trying to compromise your system access to
| your code can be a valuable asset .The worth of that could be
| well beyond just enterprise value of the organization , it
| could people's lives or bring down critical infrastructure.
|
| You don't just have access to code you created and have
| complete control to. Organizations have vendors providing
| code(drivers , libraries...) with narrow licenses that
| prohibit sharing or leaking in anyway. So this type of leak
| can open you to a lot of liability.
| tough wrote:
| so i just upgraded to pro plan but yet https://chatgpt.com/codex
| doesnt work for me and asks me to -try chatgpt pro- and shows me
| the upsell modal, even if already on the higher tier
|
| sigh
| modeless wrote:
| You mean Pro? It's only in the $200 Pro tier.
| tough wrote:
| Yes sorry meant pro,
|
| I just enabled on Settings > Connectors > Github
|
| hoping that makes it work
|
| ... still doesnt work, is it geo-restricted maybe? idk
| rapfaria wrote:
| They said Plus soon, not today.
| jiocrag wrote:
| same here. Paying for Pro ($200) but the "try it" link just
| leads to the Pro sign up page, where it says I'm already on
| Pro. Hyper intelligent coding agents, but can't make their
| website work.
| tough wrote:
| > Hyper intelligent coding agents, but can't make their
| website work.
|
| I know right
|
| also no human to contact on support... tempted to cancel the
| sub lol i'll give them 24h
| fear91 wrote:
| Same here, paying for Pro but I just get redirected to vanilla
| version...
| piskov wrote:
| > will be rolling
|
| [?] available now to all pro users
| tough wrote:
| ok but I baited the hook and now am waiting.
|
| Every -big- release they gatekeep something to pro I pay
| for it like every 3 months, then cancel after the high
|
| when will i learn
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| It says "Rolling out to users on the ChatGPT Pro Plan today" So
| it ll happen throughout the day
| alvis wrote:
| I used to work for a bank and the legal team used to ping us to
| make tiny changes to the app for compliance related issues. Now
| they can fix themselves. I think they'd be very proud and happy
| ajkjk wrote:
| Hopefully nobody lets legal touch anything without the ability
| to run the code to test it, plus code reviews. So probably not.
| eru wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are on about?
|
| You can make arbitrary teams, like legal, make PRs. You would
| still have the proper owners of the project agree whether
| they take the PRs. Either by human review and/or by any other
| review process they set up.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I am on about the fact that you are imagining something
| working in a way that it does not work in practice.
|
| You have two choices:
|
| 1. A developer makes a PR. They build the app and run it
| themselves to make sure it works, does what they intended,
| and nothing unexpected happens, and report on their testing
| in the PR. There's also a suite of automated tests. Between
| these you are confident that you can rubber-stamp it
| without touching the change yourself. But this requires
| them being able to run the code and intelligently think
| about it themselves, which AI cannot do.
|
| 2. A non-developer uses an LLM to make a PR. The change
| passes the tests, but you have no other validation about it
| because it was done by a bot that can't think about how the
| app actually works. As reviewer you have to pull down the
| change to run and validate it yourself. Now you are doing
| the same amount of work as before, except that instead of
| you telling the LLM to make the change, someone else did.
|
| The only difference is maybe that the activation energy for
| doing the work was avoided. Which, fine, is non-negligible.
| But let's not pretend like in the latter case legal "made
| the change". They did the 1% upfront work of asking the LLM
| to find where the change goes, and left you the other 99%
| of actually shepherding it through. The only changes that
| will work for at all are, like, updating copy/strings/icons
| ---and honestly, at my last job at least, we already let
| legal (and product, etc) do stuff like that. I suppose the
| LLM might save them having to figure out how to use Git, at
| least.
|
| You might imagine there's some software out there where the
| automated tests are so thorough that you can trust a code
| change to not break anything if it passes the tests. I have
| personally never seen such a thing. And in practice many
| tests validate against strings and other small feature-
| level details, meaning that the kinds of code changes that
| other orgs are making are going to be touching the tests as
| well, so human verification is still required.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| that will be an interesting new Bug tracker: anyone in the
| company will be able to report any bug or add any future
| request, if the model will be able to solve it automatically
| perfect otherwise some human might take over. The interesting
| question then will be what code changes are legal and within
| the standards of what the company wants. So non-technical
| code/issue reviewer will become a super important and
| ubiquitous job.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Not just legal/within the standards, but which actually meet
| the unspoken requirements of the request. "We just need a new
| checkbox that asks if you're left handed" might seem easy,
| but then it has ramifications for the Application PDF that
| gets generated, as well as any systems downstream, and maybe
| it requires a data conversion of some sort somewhere. I know
| that the PO's I work with miss stuff or assume that the
| request will just have features by default.
| asdev wrote:
| I promise you the legal team is not pushing any code changes
| b0ner_t0ner wrote:
| All they need is "vibes".
| skovati wrote:
| I'm curious how many ICs are truly excited about these
| advancements in coding agents. It seems to me the general trend
| is we become more like PMs managing agents and reviewing PRs, all
| for the sake of productivity gains.
|
| I imagine many engineers are like myself in that they got into
| programming because they liked tinkering and hacking and
| implementation details, all of which are likely to be abstracted
| over in this new era of prompting.
| awestroke wrote:
| At the end of the day, it's your job to deliver value. If a
| tool allows you to deliver more faster, without sacrificing
| quality, it's your responsibility to use that tool. You'll just
| have to make sure you can fully take responsibility for the end
| deliverables. And these tools are not only useful for writing
| the final code
| enjoylife wrote:
| > these tools are not only useful for writing the final code
|
| This sparked a thought in how a large part of the job is
| often the work needed to demonstrate impact. I think this
| aspect is often overlooked by some of the good engineers not
| yet taking advantage of the AI tooling. LLM loops may not yet
| be good enough to produce shippable code by themselves, but
| they sure are capable to help reduce the overhead of these up
| and out communicative tasks.
| tough wrote:
| you mean like hacking a first POC with AI to sell a
| product/feature internally to get buy-in from the rest of
| the team before actually shipping production version of it?
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| It's actually not. My job description does not say "deliver
| value" and nobody talks about my work like that so I'm not
| quite sure what to make of that.
|
| > without sacrificing quality
|
| Right..
|
| > it's your responsibility to use that tool
|
| Again, it's actually not. It's my responsibility to do my
| job, not to make my boss' - or his boss' - car nicer. I know
| that's what we all know will create "job security" but let's
| not conflate these things. My job is to do my end of the
| bargain. My boss' job is paying me for doing that. If he
| deems it necessary to force me to use AI bullshit, I will of
| course, but it is definitely not my responsibility to do so
| autonomously.
| blibble wrote:
| > At the end of the day, it's your job to deliver value. If a
| tool allows you to deliver more faster, without sacrificing
| quality
|
| I guess that's LLMs ruled out then
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I do feel that way, so I'll still do bespoke creation when I
| want to. But this is like a sewing machine. My job is to design
| fashion, and a whole line of it. I can do that when a machine
| is making the stitches instead of my using a needle in hand.
| manojlds wrote:
| We (dare I say we instead of I) like talking to computers and
| AI is another computer you talk with. So I am still all
| excited. It's people that I want to avoid :)
| qntmfred wrote:
| people can still write code by hand for fun
|
| people who want to make software that enables people to
| accomplish [task] will get the software they need quicker.
| davedx wrote:
| I think the death of our craft is around the corner. It doesn't
| fill me with joy.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Software engineering requires a fair amount of intelligence,
| so if these tools ever get to replacement levels of quality
| then it's not just developers that will be out of jobs. ARC-
| AGI-2, the countless anecdotes from professionals I've seen
| across the industry, and personal experience all very clearly
| point to a significant gap between the tools that exist today
| and general intelligence. I would recommend keeping an eye on
| improvements just because of the sheer capital investments
| going into it, but I won't be losing any sleep waiting for
| the rapture.
| neta1337 wrote:
| How so? I see it as more bugs around the corner.
| ramoz wrote:
| I see it differently. Like a kid with legos.
|
| We had to tinker piece by piece to build a miniature castle.
| Over many hours.
|
| Now I can tinker concept by concept, and build much larger
| castles, much faster. Like waving a wand, seeing my thoughts
| come to fruition in near real time.
|
| No vanity lost in my opinion. Possibly more to be gained.
| CapcomGo wrote:
| I think the bigger issue with this is that the number of
| developer jobs will shrink.
| nluken wrote:
| I think there's a disconnect between what you and the person
| you're replying to are defining as "tinkering". Your
| conception of it seems more focused on the end product when,
| to use your analogy, the original comment seems unconcerned
| with the size of castles.
|
| If you derive enjoyment from actually assembling the castle,
| you lose out on that by using the wand that makes it happen
| instantly. Sure wand's castles may be larger, but you don't
| put a Lego castle together for the finished product.
| lherron wrote:
| Factorio blueprints in action.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| > build much larger castles, much faster
|
| See that never was the purpose.. going bigger and faster,
| towards what exactly? Chaos? By the way we never managed to
| fully tackle manual software development by trained
| professionals and we now expect Shangri-La by throwing
| everything and the kitchen sink into giant inscrutable
| matrices. This time by amateurs as well. I'm sure this will
| all turn out very well and very, very productive.
| chilmers wrote:
| While I share your reservations, how many millions of people
| have experienced the exact same disruption to their jobs and
| industries because of software that we, software engineers,
| have created? It's a bit too late, and a touch hypocritical,
| for us to start complaining about technology now it is
| disrupting our way of working in a way we don't like.
| orange_puff wrote:
| I used to think this way too. Here are a few ways I've tried to
| re frame things that has helped.
|
| 1. When I work on side projects and use AI, sometimes I wonder
| "what's the point if I am just copy / pasting code? I am not
| learning anything" but what I have come to realize is building
| apps with AI assistance is the skill that I am learning, rather
| than writing code per se as it was a few years ago.
|
| 2. I work in high scale distributed computing, so I am still
| presented with ample opportunities to get very low level, which
| I love. I am not sure how much I care about writing code per se
| anymore. Working with AI still is tinkering, it has not changed
| that much for me. It is quite different, but the underlying fun
| parts are still present.
| simianwords wrote:
| Does any one how the quality drops with size of codebase?
| yanis_t wrote:
| So it's looking like it's only running in the cloud, that is it
| will push commits to my remote repo before I have a chance to see
| if it works?
|
| When I'm using aider, after it make a commit what I do, I then
| immediately run git reset HEAD^ and then git diff (actually I use
| github desktop client to see the diff) to evaluate what exactly
| it did, and if I like it or not. Then I usually make some
| adjustments and only after that commit and push.
| flakiness wrote:
| You can think of this as a managed (cloud) version of their
| codex command line tool, which runs locally on your laptop.
|
| The secret sauce here seems like their new model, but I expect
| it to come to API at some point.
| codemac wrote:
| watch the live stream, it shows you the diff as the completed
| task, you decide whether or not to generate a github pr when
| you see the diff.
| danielbln wrote:
| You may want to pass --no-auto-commits to Aider if you peel
| them off HEAD afterwards anyway.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| This takes all the soul out of programming, not sure why anyone
| likes to use llms like this.
| sumedh wrote:
| Because from a business point of view, they just want a
| feature to be built, they really care about the code if it
| works.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| It generates a PR. You decide if you want to merge, clone it
| locally, test, edit and then merge the code.
| adamTensor wrote:
| not buying windsurf then???
| motoxpro wrote:
| This would be the why of that acquisition as this needs a more
| integrated UI. Guessing by the speed at which this came out,
| this was in the works long before that acquisition.
| adamTensor wrote:
| it is not even clear *if* they are going to buy windsurf at
| all. And thats a big if. This might've just been the 'why'
| that deal is not happening.
| shmoogy wrote:
| This probably came out to beat Google I/O or something
| similar - odd Friday release otherwise.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Im super curious to see how this actually does at finding
| significant bugs, we've been working in the space on
| https://www.bismuth.sh for a while and one of the things we're
| focused on is deep validation of the code being outputted.
|
| There's so many of these "vibe coding" tools and there has to be
| real engineering rigor at some point. I saw them demo "find the
| bug" but the bugs they found were pretty superficial and thats
| something we've seen in our internal benchmark from both Devin
| and Cursor. A lot of noise and false positives or superficial
| fixes.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Why hasn't Github released this? Why it's OpenAI releasing this?!
| adpirz wrote:
| It's on their roadmap: https://github.blog/news-
| insights/product-news/github-copilo...
|
| But they aren't moving nearly as fast as OpenAI. And it remains
| to be seen if first mover will mean anything.
| taytus wrote:
| Github moves too slow, and OpenAI moves too fast.
| danielbln wrote:
| GitHub has released this, it's called Copilot Agent.
| johnjwang wrote:
| Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of
| the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive.
|
| We've long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we
| didn't expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas:
|
| Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits
| (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without
| context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the
| same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline,
| etc.)
|
| It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just
| need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and
| it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work
| to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite
| number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on
| different things.
|
| Model quality is good, but hard to say it's that much better than
| other models. In side-by-side tests with Cursor + Gemini 2.5-pro,
| naming, style and logic are relatively indistinguishable, so
| quality meets our bar but doesn't yet exceed it.
| fourside wrote:
| > You still need to do a lot of work to get it production
| ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior
| engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.
|
| One issue with junior devs is that because they're not fully
| autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time
| guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy
| access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would
| become the bottleneck.
|
| Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could
| get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?
| fabrice_d wrote:
| They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it
| production ready". So I would say it's not much better than
| real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to
| a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also
| were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen
| with AI tools.
| bmcahren wrote:
| Counter-point A: AI coding assistance tools are rapidly
| advancing at a clip that is inarguably faster than humans.
|
| Counter-point B: AI does not get tired, does not need
| space, does not need catering to their experience. AI is
| fine being interrupted and redirected. AI is fine spending
| two days on something that gets overwritten and thrown away
| (no morale loss).
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Counter-counter-point A: If I work with a human Junior
| and they make an error or I familiarize them with any
| quirk of our workflow, and I correct them, they will
| recall that correction moving forward. An AI assistant
| either will not remember 5 minutes later (in a different
| prompt on a related project) and repeat the mistake, or
| I'll have to take the extra time to code some reminder
| into the system prompt for every project moving forward.
|
| Advancements in general AI knowledge over time will not
| correlate to improvements in remembering any matters as
| colloquial as this.
|
| Counter-counter-point B: AI _absolutely_ needs catering
| to their experience. Prompter must always learn how to
| phrase things so that the AI will understand them, adjust
| things when they get stuck in loops by removing confusing
| elements from the prompt, etc.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I find myself thinking about juniors vs AI as babies vs
| cats. A cat is more capable sooner, you can trust it when
| you leave the house for two hours, but it'll never grow
| past shitting in a box and needing to be fed.
| scragz wrote:
| most of the coding agents now encourage you to make a
| rule for those times so it does remember.
| TheHegemon wrote:
| > If I work with a human Junior and they make an error or
| I familiarize them with any quirk of our workflow, and I
| correct them, they will recall that correction moving
| forward
|
| I really wish that were the case. Most of the Jr
| Engineers I work with have to be told the same thing
| multiple times, in different ways, for things to stick.
| rfoo wrote:
| You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves
| quite a lot time too.
|
| As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing
| it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these
| things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For
| those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the
| opposite.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I'm definitely wary of the concept of dismissing courtesy
| when working with AI agents, because I certainly don't want
| to lose that habit when I turn around and have to interact
| with humans again.
| brookst wrote:
| Exactly. Courtesy and kindness are largely for the
| benefit of the giver. People who think "now I'm free to
| be the jerk I really am" worry me.
| strangescript wrote:
| it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1
| seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model.
| You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison
| where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy.
|
| It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high
| benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4
| full model right?
| aorobin wrote:
| Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results
| until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because
| gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning
| capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant
| release.
| losvedir wrote:
| Do you still think there will be a gpt-5? I thought the
| consensus was GPT-5 never really panned out and was
| released with little fanfare as 4.1.
| aorobin wrote:
| Yeah, just last month Altman said gpt-5 is coming in a
| few months, and betting/prediction sites are expecting it
| this year, probably in the summer.
| brookst wrote:
| Marketing names aren't really connected to product
| generations. We might target v3 of a product for a date
| and then decide it's really 2.4, doesn't mean we won't
| market something as v3 later.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you
| watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in
| the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it
| makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent,
| on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?
| scragz wrote:
| it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task
| and hopefully one works it out.
| woah wrote:
| > Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits
| (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently
| without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of
| tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in
| Cursor, Cline, etc.)
|
| > It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just
| need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and
| it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of
| work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an
| infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all
| working on different things.
|
| What's the benefit of this? It sounds like it's just a gimmick
| for the "AI will replace programmers" headlines. In reality,
| LLMs complete their tasks within seconds, and the time
| consuming part is specifying the tasks and then reviewing and
| correcting them. What is the point of parallelizing the fastest
| part of the process?
| ctoth wrote:
| > Each task is processed independently in a separate,
| isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can
| read and edit files, as well as run commands including test
| harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion
| typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on
| complexity, and you can monitor Codex's progress in real
| time.
| johnjwang wrote:
| In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time
| (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially
| with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline /
| other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to
| get distracted, lose context, and start working on another
| task.
|
| So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you
| can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our
| engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the
| parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain
| off of one task and moving on to a different task.
| woah wrote:
| In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5,
| if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually
| lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?
| odie5533 wrote:
| It depends what level you ask them to work on, but I
| agree, all of my agent coding is active and completed in
| usually <15 seconds.
| scragz wrote:
| with cline you can give it a huge action plan and it will
| grind away until it's done. with all the context
| shenanigans that cursor and copilot do, it can't handle
| multiple tasks as well. then they are farming requests
| from the user so they make you click to continue all the
| time.
| kfajdsl wrote:
| A single response can take a few seconds, but tasks with
| agentic flows can be dozens of back and forths. I've had a
| fairly complicated Roo Code task take 10 minutes (multiple
| subtasks).
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| > We've long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so
| we didn't expect too much.
|
| If you don't mind, what were the strengths and limitations of
| Claude Code compared to Codex? You mentioned parallel task
| execution being a standout feature for Codex - was this a
| particular pain point with Claude Code? Any other insights on
| how Claude Code performed for your team would be valuable. We
| are pleased with Claude Code at the moment and were a bit
| underwhelmed by comparable Codex CLI tool OAI released earlier
| this month.
| t_a_mm_acq wrote:
| Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree
| on different terminals instances, it's been a significant
| unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1.
| master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2.
| operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests,
| bugs, additional context.
|
| rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again.
| Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently.
|
| downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting
| stuff done across distributed teams..
| naiv wrote:
| do you have then instance 2 and 3 listening to instance 1
| with just a prompt? or how does this work?
| naiv wrote:
| to answer my own questions , it is actually laid out in
| chapter 6 of
| https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-
| pract...
| criddell wrote:
| If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the
| future will come from?
|
| My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree
| in computer science and what she's told me about the job market
| is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of
| postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.
|
| My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after
| posting for a relatively low level position was nuts. There was
| just no hope of giving each candidate a fair chance and that
| really sucks.
|
| My kid's classmates who did find work did it mostly through
| personal connections.
| echelon wrote:
| The never ending march of progress.
|
| It's probably over for these folks.
|
| There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients
| for people to climb.
|
| In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects.
| It's coming for everyone.
| voidspark wrote:
| It's his daughter. He is worried about his daughter first
| and foremost. Weird reply.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm sorry. I was skimming. I had no idea he mentioned his
| kid.
|
| I was running a quick errand between engineering meetings
| and saw the first few lines about hiring juniors, and I
| wrote a couple of comments about how I feel about all of
| this.
|
| I'm not always guilty of skimming, but today I was.
| hintymad wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in
| the future will come from?
|
| Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read
| somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and
| manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the
| same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we
| think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies
| continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-
| how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the
| world leader in increasingly more industries.
| echelon wrote:
| It's happening to Hollywood right now. In the past three
| years, since roughly 2022, the majority of IATSE folks
| (film crew, grips, etc.) have seen their jobs disappear to
| Eastern Europe where the labor costs one tenth of what it
| does here. And there are no rules for maximum number of
| consecutive hours worked.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| How do? Perhaps if you film in Eastern Europe (which I
| realize does happen a bit), but even if your crew is
| foreign, if you're filming in the US they're still
| subject to US labor law. Being willing to ignore labor
| law also happens but is a bit beyond "offshoring".
| echelon wrote:
| The film production company flies the cast of actors out
| to Serbia or whatever and relies on Serbian crews.
|
| Prior to 2022 they'd fly out the entire crew from the US
| and all the workers would be American and Canadian.
| Union, highly paid. Now they're using local (non-
| American) labor.
|
| Amazon and Apple taught the foreign talent how to do grip
| work so they didn't have to hire expensive American
| workers anymore.
|
| There are far fewer productions happening domestically
| within the US now. The numbers are 30% of what they once
| were.
| ta988 wrote:
| This is happening increasingly in pharma companies as
| well.
| genewitch wrote:
| There was a pull quote about adding a 100% tariff to
| films made outside of the US.
|
| I wonder if that's related
| lurking_swe wrote:
| ahh, the classic "i shall please my investors next quarter
| while ignoring reality, so i can disappoint my shareholders
| in 10 years". lol.
|
| As you say, happens all the time. Also doesn't make sense
| because so few people are buying individual stocks anyway.
| Goal should be to consistently outperform over the long
| term. Wall street tends to be very myopic.
|
| Thinking long term is a hard concept for the bean counters
| at these tech companies i guess...
| miohtama wrote:
| What then ends up happening is that companies how fall
| behind in R&D eventually lose market share and get
| replaced by more agile competitors.
|
| But this does not happen in industry verticals that are
| protected by regulation (banks) or national interest
| (Boring).
| kypro wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in
| the future will come from?
|
| They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if
| companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then
| just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev.
|
| But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find
| skilled labour domestically they should consider bringing
| skilled workers from abroad. There are literally hundreds of
| millions of Indians who got connected to the internet over
| the last decade. There's no reason a company should struggle
| to find senior engineers.
| oytis wrote:
| So basically all education facilities should go abroad too
| if no one needs Western fresh grads. Will provide a lot of
| shareholder value, but there are some externalities too.
| rboyd wrote:
| India coming online just in time for AI is awkward
| slater wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in
| the future will come from?
|
| Money number must _always_ go up. Hiring people costs money.
| "Oh hey I just read this article, sez you can have A.I. code
| your stuff, for pennies?"
| ilaksh wrote:
| I don't think jobs are necessarily a good plan at all
| anymore. Figure out how to leverage AIs and robots as cheap
| labor, and sell services or products. But if someone is
| trying to get a job, I get the impression that networking
| helps more than anything.
| sandspar wrote:
| Yeah, the value of the typical job application meta is
| trending to zero very quickly. Entrepreneurship has a steep
| learning curve; you should start learning it as soon as
| possible. Don't waste your time learning to run a straight
| line - we're entering off-road territory.
| DGAP wrote:
| There aren't going to be senior engineers in the future.
| _bin_ wrote:
| This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior
| engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear
| essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit
| accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at
| companies that they should undertake to provide this positive
| externality isn't really a constructive solution.
|
| I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can
| replace junior devs in 2-5 years and seniors in 10-20, when
| the old ones are largely gone. But that's sort of beside the
| point as far as most corporate decision-making.
| nopinsight wrote:
| With Agentic RL training and sufficient data, AI operating
| at the level of average _senior engineers_ should become
| plausible in a couple to a few years.
|
| Top-tier engineers who integrate a deep understanding of
| business and user needs into technical design will likely
| be safe until we get full-fledged AGI.
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Why in a few years? What training data is missing that we
| can't have senior level agents today?
| nopinsight wrote:
| Training data, esp interaction data from agentic coding
| tools, are important for that. See also: Windsurf
| acquisition.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| On the other hand I'm pretry sure you will need senior
| engineers not only for designing but debugging. You don't
| want to hit a wall when your Agentic coder hits a bug
| that it just won't fix.
| nopinsight wrote:
| There's a recent article with experiments suggesting LLMs
| are better at bug fixing than coding, iirc. It's from a
| company with a relevant product though.
| eru wrote:
| Why do you expect AIs to learn programming, but not
| debugging?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| 1) Debugging is much harder than writing code that works
|
| 2) AIs are demonstrably much, much worse at debugging
| code than writing fresh code
|
| Ex: "Oh, I see the problem! Let me fix that" -> proceeds
| to create a new bug while not fixing the old one
| eru wrote:
| Debugging is harder for humans, too.
| al_borland wrote:
| That sounds like a dangerous bet.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Sounds like a bet a later CEO will need to check.
| _bin_ wrote:
| As I see it, it's actually the only safe bet.
|
| Case 1: you keep training engineers.
|
| Case 1.1: AGI soon, you don't need juniors or seniors
| besides a very few. You cost yourself a ton of money that
| competitors can reinvest into R&D, use to undercut your
| prices, or return to keep their investors happy.
|
| Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in
| line with that to avoid losing those engineers you
| trained.
|
| Case 2: You quit training juniors and let AI do the work.
|
| Case 2.1: AGI soon, you have saved yourself a bundle of
| cash and remain mostly in in line with the market.
|
| Case 2.2: no AGI, you are in the same bidding war for
| talent as everyone else, the same place you'd have been
| were you to have spent all that cash to train engineers.
| You now have a juicier balance sheet with which to enter
| this bidding war.
|
| The only way out of this, you can probably see, is some
| sort of external co-ordination, as is the case with most
| of these situations. The high-EV move is to quit training
| juniors, by a mile, independently of whether AI can
| replace senior devs in a decade.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| An interesting thing to consider is that Codex might get
| people to be better at delegating, which might improve
| the effectiveness of hiring junior engineers. Because the
| senior engineers will have better skills at delegating,
| leading to a more effective collaboration.
| al_borland wrote:
| You're looking at it from the point of view of an
| individual company. I'm seeing it as a risk for the
| entire industry.
|
| Senior engineers are already very well paid. Wages rising
| a lot from where they already are, while companies
| compete for a few people, and those who can't afford it
| need to lean on AI or wait 10+ years for someone to
| develop with equivalent expertise... all of this sounds
| bad for the industry. It's only good for the few senior
| engineers that are about to retire, and the few who went
| out of their way to not use AI and acquire actual skills.
| jgilias wrote:
| Well, yes. But nobody is running the entire industry.
| You're running a company that has competitors willing to
| eat your lunch.
| lmm wrote:
| > Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in
| line with that to avoid losing those engineers you
| trained.
|
| No you don't. Most engineers are shy, conflict-averse,
| and hate change. You can keep underpaying them and most
| of them will stay.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, but only up to a point.
| majormajor wrote:
| Case 1.3: No AGI, tools increase productivity a lot, you
| have a bigger team and you make them more productive. In
| the meantime, while everyone else was scared of hiring,
| you got a bunch of stuff done to _gain a lead_ in the
| market.
|
| You get high EV because _everyone else in your market
| voluntarily slowing down_ is a gift-wrapped miracle for
| you.
|
| (Even in an AGI-soon case - you spent a bit more (let's
| be serious here, we're not talking about spending our
| entire bankroll on 18months of new hires here) in short
| term to get ahead, then you shift people around or lay
| them off. Your competitors invested that money into R&D?
| What does that even mean if it didn't involve hiring and
| AGI happens soon anyway?)
|
| ----
|
| (Case 3: AGI soon, you don't need yourself anymore - it's
| hard to imagine a sufficiently advanced "AGI" that
| someone _only_ replaces software devs but leaves the
| structure, management, and MBA-trappings of modern
| exchange and businesses alone.)
| eru wrote:
| > The only way out of this, you can probably see, is some
| sort of external co-ordination, as is the case with most
| of these situations.
|
| You lack imagination. You can eg just charge juniors for
| the training.
|
| Either directly (which won't really work, because juniors
| almost by definition don't have a lot of money), or via a
| bond that they have to pay back iff they jump ship before
| a set number of years.
|
| Have a look at how airlines and airline pilots pay for
| their expensive education.
| skatanski wrote:
| I'm curious about other aspects of this: - leverage of
| countries who can host such AI over countries who can't,
| will there be a point when countries can't allow
| themselves not to have access to ,,emergency" talent in
| case they can't use AI? Recent ,,choose european",
| tariffs show that much of the high end stuff is
| concentrated in US and China. - outages happen, does the
| company stop because the cloud is not working? - highly
| regulated companies still can't use copilot to its
| fullest because of ,,can't show answer because it's
| matching public code" - is replacing all talent safe - in
| terms of operational or national safety?
| eru wrote:
| Not being able to use AI would be entirely self-inflicted
| at the country level.
|
| You can get around most of your objections by using a
| model with open weights that you run on-premises.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| This hyper-fixation on replacing engineers in writing code
| is hilarious, and dangerous, to me. Many people, even in
| tech companies, have no idea how software is built,
| maintained, and run.
|
| I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers
| and product owners.
| jchanimal wrote:
| The real judge will be survivorship bias and as a betting
| man, I might think product owners are the ones with the
| entrepreneurial spirit to make it to the other side.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| I've worked for a company which turned from startup to
| this. Product owners had no clue what they own. And no
| brain capacity to suggest something useful. They were
| just taken from the street at best, most likely had
| relatives' helping hands. In a couple of years company
| probably tripled manages headcount. It didn't help.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Product owners and project managers have the soft skills
| to convince the company that they aren't a drain on its
| resources regardless of what they actually are.
| gersh wrote:
| Yeah, but can they out-perform LLMs at soft skills? LLMs
| are really good sucking up, and telling people what they
| want to hear.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| it's obviously intensely correlated: the vast majority of
| scenarios either both are replaced or neither
| odie5533 wrote:
| As a dev, if you try taking away my product owners I will
| fight you. Who am I going to ask for requirements and
| sign-offs, the CEO?
| oytis wrote:
| Your architect, principal engineer etc. (one spot-on job
| title I've seen is "product architect"), who in turn
| talks to the senior management. Basically an engineer
| with a talent and experience for building products rather
| than a manager with superficial understanding of
| engineering. I think the most ambitious teams have
| someone like this on top - or at least around
| odie5533 wrote:
| I've had your type of product owner, but I've also had a
| product owner that was an ex-staff engineer. Companies
| should hire ex-engineer product owners, not strictly
| people-manager product owners.
| oytis wrote:
| Technical background doesn't always help in my experience
| - it's just a different role. Creating great product
| requires deep technical expertise to understand where the
| cutting edge is, vision to understand how it can be
| expanded and business expertise to understand what makes
| sense economically. It's just not a manager's job, you
| can't perform it by collecting customer requirements in a
| spreadsheet.
| deadmutex wrote:
| Perhaps the role will merge into one, and will replace a
| good chunk of those jobs.
|
| E.g.:
|
| If we have 10 PMs and 90 devs today, that could be
| hypothetically be replace by 8 PM+Dev, 20 specialized
| devs, and 2 specialized PMs in the future.
| mathgeek wrote:
| A 70% reduction in the labor force of product and
| engineering has a lot of consequences.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you have 10PMs and 90 devs today, and go to 8 "hybrid"
| PMs + 2 specialized PMs, you're probably still creating
| backlog items faster than that team can close them.
|
| So you end up with some choices:
|
| * do you move at the same speed, with fewer people?
|
| * do you try to move faster, with less of a reduction in
| people? this could be trickier than it sounds because if
| the frequency of changes increases the frequency of
| unintended consequences likely does too, so your team
| will have to spend time reacting to that
|
| I think the companies that win will be the second batch.
| It's what happens today, basically, but today you have to
| convince VCs or the public market to give you a bunch of
| more money to hire to 10x the team size. Getting a (one-
| off?) chance to do that through tooling improvements is a
| big gift, wasting it on reducing costs instead of
| increasing growth could be risky.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The people who will come out the other side are domain
| focused people with the engineering chops to understand
| the system end to end, and the customer skills to
| understand what needs to be built.
| jackphilson wrote:
| Yes. everyone will eventually have the job title of
| "problem solver"
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Don't forget the very important role of managing the
| problem solvers--if you just let the problem solvers run
| amuck all sorts of problems might be solved.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Major Dilbert vibes
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, if places like RAND or Xerox PARC or the OG
| Skunkworks, or even Manhattan Project and Apollo Program
| taught us, is that you _cannot let engineers and domain
| experts run the show_ , because if you do, they start
| doing some world-upending shit like putting GUIs on the
| Moon, or building nukes, or supersonic jets, or inventing
| new materials that violate the natural order of things,
| or they generally just rock the boat too much,
| continuously disrupting the corporate and political
| pecking order.
|
| Nah, you have to put them in hamster wheels so they keep
| generating steady value for the shareholders, and put
| those in open plan offices so they get too mentally
| exhausted and distracted to try and change things. Throw
| in free cheese during good economy to keep them happy,
| but that's strictly optional.
| eru wrote:
| > I think instead we should focus on getting rid of
| managers and product owners.
|
| Who says companies aren't doing that with AI (and
| technology in general) already?
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Who says they are doing that?
|
| The _instead_ was a key word in my comment. I didn't say,
| or imply, they weren't working on replacing other roles
| with AI.
| hooverd wrote:
| I think it'll be great if you're working in software not
| for a software company.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has
| been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember
| when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who
| would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out
| of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding
| experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years,
| and then a small number will stay and the rest will go
| elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of
| juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no
| matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the
| industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation
| where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in
| ecosystems that are only 5 years old.
|
| That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a
| culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing
| real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by
| the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This
| was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like
| these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of
| applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a
| way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew
| JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was
| pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually
| no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and
| languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years
| learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one
| person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized
| these days.
|
| But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start
| hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I recently read an article about the US having a relatively
| weak occupational training.
|
| To contrast, CH and GER are known to have very robust and
| regulated apprenticeship programs. Meaning you start
| working at a much earlier age (16) and go to vocational
| school at the same time for about 4 years. This path is
| then supported with all kinds of educational stepping
| stones later down the line.
|
| There are many software developers who went that route in
| CH for example, starting with an application development
| apprenticeship, then getting to technical college in their
| mid 20's and so on.
|
| I think this model has a lot of advantages. University is
| for kids who like school and the academic approach to
| learning. Apprenticeships plus further education or an
| autodidactic path then casts a much broader net, where you
| learn practical skills much earlier.
|
| There are several advantages and disadvantages of both
| paths. In summary I think the academic path provides deeper
| CS knowledge which can be a force multiplier. The
| apprenticeship path leads to earlier high productivity and
| pragmatism.
|
| My opinion is that in combination, both being strongly
| supported paths, creates more opportunities for people and
| strengthens the economy as a whole.
| oytis wrote:
| I know about this system, but I am not convinced it can
| work in such a dynamic field as software. When tools
| change all the time, you need strong fundamentals to stay
| afloat - which is what universities provide.
|
| Vocational training focusing on immediate fit for the
| market is great for companies that want to extract
| maximal immediate value from labour for minimal cost, but
| longer term is not good for engineers themselves.
| eru wrote:
| I actually think it work fairly well, if it wasn't
| regulated.
|
| Eg a company like Google (or similar) could probably
| offer you better on the job vocational training than
| going to uni would do to teach anyone programming.
| jdietrich wrote:
| A formal apprenticeship still includes academic training
| - either one or two days a week at college, or longer
| blocks spread throughout the year. I can't speak for
| software engineers, but the mechanical engineers I know
| that have finished a German apprenticeship have a very
| rigorous theoretical background.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| do most people know country codes to the degree that they
| know CH is Switzerland? as feedback, i found this added
| an unnecessary extra layer of opacity to this comment
| vegashacker wrote:
| Whoops, definitely read that as China until your comment.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| I like how the smallest Eurocentrism is greeted with the
| wagging finger to be inclusive on hackernews, while the
| expectation is that 50 state acronyms are well understood
| by any reader from Lazio, Lorraine, or Thuringia ;)
| thomasahle wrote:
| > But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier
| task in the early 00s
|
| The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an open
| source library we were starting to use.
|
| I think there's still lots of opportunity for honing your
| skill, and showing it off, outside of schools.
| tonfreed wrote:
| Agreed. One of my mentors early on was a self taught
| engineer and honestly I'd trust him a lot more than some
| of the engineers with degrees
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an
| open source library we were starting to use.
|
| From my experience no one cares. You're lucky if
| recruiter even looks at your CV, not to mention your
| GitHub profile.
| ori_b wrote:
| This is why I've managed to help startups I have worked
| at make better hires; I look at the code candidates have
| written, and poke through the commits on GitHub.
| pletnes wrote:
| As a candidate, you highlight it yourself!
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Some of this relates to a culture of job-hopping. It seems
| uncommon these days to stick around at a company for many
| years.
|
| If your next hire is only going to stay for 1-2 years, it
| doesn't make sense to hire a junior team member and invest
| in their growth.
| lemontheme wrote:
| That sadly makes sense. I'm in a position lately to
| influence hiring decisions and I'm noticing a similar
| bias in myself.
|
| As a job hopper myself, I can't fault others for doing it
| though. I never hopped for the money. I just got bored or
| felt isolated in my role. But a nice consequence is that
| my salary actually appreciably increased, as opposed to
| colleagues/friends who stuck with the same company.
| sbarre wrote:
| I've often given developers I mentor the advice they
| should "zig-zag" to grow their career and get varied
| experiences rather than stay in one place too long, but
| my advice was 2-3 years at each place at minimum.
|
| I think anything less than that, and you haven't had time
| to really learn an ecosystem, and more importantly you
| might not have had a chance to live with the consequences
| of your technical decisions (i.e. supporting something in
| prod that you built).
|
| I know plenty of people who started somewhere, left for a
| while, and then came back and ended up in a position
| higher than they would have gotten if they had stayed put
| and tried to climb internally.
|
| And yes agreed that moving around will 100% grow your
| comp faster than staying put (in most cases).
| sensanaty wrote:
| I mean I wish I could stay, but companies are greedy and
| refuse to give out decent raises or promotions regardless
| of your contributions. The only real way to make more
| money is to hop between jobs, all the while these
| companies are making record profits year after year.
|
| Like right now I've been at current co for 3 years. At
| the start I was getting decent raises after big projects.
| I now have increasingly more responsibility, I'm doing
| hiring, I'm doing mentorship, I'm doing huge feature
| work, I have to waste half my time talking to the
| braindead stakeholders. And what do I get for that?
| Absolutely jackshit, I'm getting paid the same I was when
| I had a quarter of the responsibility and work, yet the
| company is boasting about making ever more money as they
| lay off entire teams of people.
|
| Why on earth would I be loyal at this point, it's clear
| they don't give the slightest inkling of a shit about me
| or anyone else who does have "Head of" or "Chief"
| prepended to their title.
| occz wrote:
| That's a self-inflicted wound on the part of the
| companies though, with them offering relatively shit pay
| for people who stick around compared to people who switch
| jobs.
|
| You get what you optimize for, really.
| _delirium wrote:
| I don't think it's been dead for 10 years. I'd place it at
| maybe 3? I teach at a mid-ranked university and the
| majority of my fresh out of college students were getting
| good-to-great entry level offers just a few years ago. The
| top 5-10% were getting _well_ into six figure offers from
| FAANG or similar companies. But the entry level job market
| really tanked in mid 2022 when all the big tech companies
| did rounds of layoffs, and it 's been much harder since
| then.
| baq wrote:
| It started with the end of ZIRP and LLMs finished the
| job.
| genewitch wrote:
| "Money isn't free anymore, let's set ours on fire / give
| it to NVDA"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| More like, "Money isn't free anymore, so let's try and
| automate away some more labor". It's very much not
| setting the money on fire from business POV - it's the
| opposite actually. It's also a constant in history - the
| more expensive human labor gets, the more effort is put
| into eliminating the need for it (whether by automating
| jobs away or redesigning the product or the entire
| business to not need them in the first place).
| sbarre wrote:
| We should factor in the hiring sprees that really
| distorted the market from 2020-2022..
|
| 2020-2022 was not "normal hiring", it was much higher
| than normal.
|
| Even the large, conservative, boring enterprise where I
| work was hiring about 5 new developers a week in those
| years.. I know because I did the "Welcome to our
| department" technical onboarding workshop and I saw
| everyone coming in the door every week.
|
| Before 2020 I ran that workshop once a month or so?
| Probably 10 times a year at most.
|
| So of course then the layoffs came when ZIRP ended, as
| everyone had to adjust back to real world conditions and
| grapple with the fact that the team sizes they had now
| were not sustainable (or necessary?) when free money
| ended.
|
| Couple that with "efficiencies" from AI and generally
| more conservative scope and ambition by a lot of
| companies in these uncertain times, and the market looks
| drastically worse than it did in 2020-2022.
|
| But if you compare the market today to 2018 (for example)
| instead, it's still worse but definitely not as worse.
|
| Lastly, hiring is also very broken today due to AI, with
| candidates using it to flood companies with applications
| and then companies using AI to auto-filter that incoming
| flood (and likely losing out on good candidates in the
| process) simply because they can't handle the volume.
|
| I have a lot of sympathy for folks coming right out of
| university trying to land their first good job. I'm sure
| it's the toughest it's been in a generation...
| therealpygon wrote:
| This was pretty much the height of the "bootcamp" era,
| and while some were still great at teaching solid
| programming skills, many people who were mediocre coders
| saw it as a quick way to make money off those who don't
| know better. In my opinion, companies started noting more
| and more that they were hiring people who can barely code
| in a real software environment but had focused training
| on resume padding and interview prep, and that many of
| the college graduates weren't any better off, so they
| ramped up to far more rigorous testing, live coding
| projects, and more and more rounds of interviews just to
| weed out all the people who had been taught how to BS
| their way into a tech job. Now the interview process has
| become so cumbersome that it is more worthwhile to filter
| out nearly every applicant immediately.
| rtpg wrote:
| I feel like hiring juniors still exists, because I still
| hear about loads of "boring" small startups that do the "we
| hire juniors and seniors".
|
| Juniors cuz they're cheap and motivated (and potentially
| grow into very good team members!), seniors to handle the
| trickier stuff. Mid-level people don't get picked up cuz
| there's enough junior pipeline that the cost-benefit
| doesn't work out.
|
| Thing is these companies tend to have, say, college
| pipelines and the like for juniors. Internships and the
| like. It would be really painful to not have internships
| lined up at "your local startup" in this day and age.
|
| My impression is that a lot of the junior dev pipeline is
| in smaller places that don't show up in job boards in the
| same way as the rest of it. Maybe that's dried up too, but
| I have my doubts.
|
| You still need somebody to work the robot, even if the
| robot is "doing the coding"!
| fragmede wrote:
| The problem is getting hired. With all the resources
| available today, learning programming is easy compared to
| pre-LLM, pre-Stack Overflow, pre- _Google_ days of learning
| to program. I dare say an autodidact in the original dot
| com boom, transported to today, would be fine, as far as
| being useful to a company goes. You don 't need to know
| every frontend framework, all possible backends, and be a
| Linux god at devops, all at once. Sure there's more stuff
| today then in the 00's, but no team is using all of all
| three of those simultaneously, so what you practically have
| to know isn't too much for a motivated individual to learn.
|
| The problem is getting hired. If seniors are having
| problems getting callbacks for interviews right now, then a
| young kid with a thin resume isn't going to get hired, no
| matter how senior their skills are in reality.
| zo1 wrote:
| The place where I work at hires an ungodly amount of
| juniors and fresh-grads (because a lot of them drop out and
| quit before they do any meaningful work). We're talking
| people that are completely unproductive and unusable for
| any sort of commercial project. We then spend at-least a
| year or two giving them a salary whilst they do toy
| projects and get trained. Literally doing what I remember
| doing in 1st/2nd year college with group projects and pet-
| assignments, complete with grades and feedback etc. Even
| after all of that, we still have to "train" them with hand-
| holding on an actual project work before they are a net-
| positive. Sooner or later someone will realize that they
| can just forego all that wasted training effort and just
| hire someone that is already productive. There is always a
| small percentage that are _amazing_ and they get pushed
| through to projects very quickly. Which is a shame, because
| they then watch their fellow cohort sit around doing pet-
| projects and receive a salary, whilst they slog through a
| real project with deadlines, stress and the risk of
| failing.
|
| This is entirely a combination of two things: The quality
| of grads coming out of college/university, and pressures
| coming from the market. Colleges have been pushing through
| entirely unqualified students, some even language
| illiterate, into the market place and what we're seeing is
| a response to that. Now couple that with the pressures that
| companies are facing, and you can see why none of them want
| to even take on the risk of training and up-skilling
| someone just so they can find the actual good employees
| which are a small percentage.
|
| Of course, in my company's particular country and context,
| government regulations make it impossible to fire someone
| and there is huge pressure to keep-up DEI quotas despite no
| actual good DEI candidates being available, and we have a
| mess. Day to day is glorified baby-sitting people not-
| knowing what to do, dealing with their "feelings" (usually
| feelings of inadequacy and sometimes snobbish entitlement)
| and still trying complete a project at the same time.
| eru wrote:
| Why does your company even hire those people? They seem
| like a net negative as far as your profit-and-loss is
| concerned?
|
| I mean even compared to just not hiring any juniors.
| genewitch wrote:
| Hmm, I thought Matz had a story like this but AI tells me
| it's probably apocryphal. Ruby developer applies for ruby
| job where they want more years of experience than existed
| since he wrote ruby.
|
| Oh well, I know that it happens, saw it in 2010 with
| "cloud" when it was basically still just EC2,S3,RDS, and
| whatever the not-haproxy-but-haproxy load balancer was
| called, ELB. Job poatings asking for half a decade or more
| of experience. I always get the feeling there's some
| requirement they post jobs public but only hire internal,
| but I have no way to prove that; I have heard others say
| this, though.
| elif wrote:
| I recall that story as well. I think it might have been
| in a ruby weekly email if you sub to that.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Bottom of the barrel consultancy shops will hire as cheap
| as possible. E.g. some liberal arts major whose only coding
| experience is a 2 week 'bootcamp'.
|
| They will sell them as 'junior SE' on the first 2 projects,
| 'medior SE' on the next and then they'll be 'senior SE'
| within 18 months tops of leaving bootcamp.
|
| The projects by these shops are nearly always troubled,
| requiring many (customer paid in change requests) reworks
| before (if ever) getting in production.
|
| They seldom are hired to do projects for a client twice,
| but it's a lemom's market and there's plenty of fish in the
| sea.
|
| So what happens with these shops is that their SE's will
| rely even more than average on AI assistants, and deliver a
| v0.1 faster, but with 10x more code and holes than before,
| taking even longer to get in production but given lemons
| and fish have not changed they'll still hire, now even
| cheaper out of 'prompt engineering bootcamp'
| tazjin wrote:
| > Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has
| been like this for about 10 years and I hate it
|
| We still have a large funnel of interns that end up
| becoming junior devs, and then progressing normally. I
| don't know the exact ratio of interns that end up actually
| getting hired as full-time employees, it's definitely low,
| but I think this is more of a function of most of them not
| actually being any good.
| taf2 wrote:
| We have had a lot of success hiring right out of college
| over the last 10 years
| api wrote:
| One problem I've seen is that junior now means "hustler who
| is faking it" or "code boot camp grad who doesn't really
| understand anything." If I ask for a "junior" I get someone
| who googles and asks ChatGPT.
|
| High salaries in programming has attracted a lot of people
| who have no passion for the craft. To get good you have to
| have that and it takes years of either school or passionate
| autodidactic learning or both.
| oytis wrote:
| I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior
| engineers either as capabilities evolve.
|
| But also, I think this underestimates significantly what
| junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have
| spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a
| university - and they normally need to be already good at
| school math. All they lack is experience applying this
| education on a job - but they are professionals - educated,
| proactive and mostly smart.
|
| The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a
| senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort
| of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related
| to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic
| slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce
| investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of
| uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will
| need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere
| near to having a real economic impact.
|
| Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.
| LPisGood wrote:
| > and they normally need to be already good at school math.
| All they lack is experience applying this education on a
| job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and
| mostly smart.
|
| Without being overly pessimistic, this interpretation is
| extremely generous.
| spookie wrote:
| Hardly.
|
| What I've mostly seen when it isn't the case is an
| employer who hasn't let them fly, but simply bombarded
| them with work nobody wants to do. They become cynical,
| and it is understandable.
| voidspark wrote:
| This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are
| setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the
| workers develop their own replacements before they retire
| with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly
| obsolete too.
|
| I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a
| rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore
| juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see
| this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they
| don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are
| too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.
|
| Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI
| paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all
| industries.
| criddell wrote:
| > I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a
| rewarding part of the job.
|
| That's really awesome. I hope my daughter finds a job
| somewhere that values professional development. I'd hate
| for her to quit the industry before she sees just how
| interesting and rewarding it can be.
|
| I didn't have many mentors when starting out, but the ones
| I had were so unbelievably helpful both professionally and
| personally. If I didn't have their advice and
| encouragement, I don't think I'd still be doing what I'm
| doing.
| aprdm wrote:
| She can try to reach out to possible mentors / people on
| Linkedin. A bit like cold calling. It works, people
| (usually) want to help and don't mind sharing their
| experiences / tips. I know I have helped many random
| linedin cold messages from recent grads/people in uni
| oytis wrote:
| > I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a
| rewarding part of the job.
|
| Can totally relate. Unfortunately the trend for all-senior
| teams and companies has started long before ChatGPT, so the
| opportunities have been quite scarce, at least in a
| professional environment.
| dimal wrote:
| Depending on corporations to have a moral foundation is a
| losing bet. It has to come from the outside.
|
| Here's a possible out: Senior engineers stop working huge
| corporations and use these tools to start their own
| businesses. (Given today's hiring situation, this may not
| even be a choice.) As the business grows, hire junior
| developers as apprentices to handle day to day tasks while
| senior engineer works on bigger picture stuff. Junior
| engineer grows into a senior engineer who eventually uses
| AI to start their own business. This is a very abbreviated
| version of what I hope I can do, at least.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| So depending on people to do harder work for less pay--
| that is the winning bet?
|
| Your solution cannot work at scale, because if the small
| companies you propose succeed, then they will become
| corporations, which, as you say, cannot be depended upon
| to do the right thing.
| layer8 wrote:
| I share your worries, but the time horizon for the supply of
| senior engineers drying up is just too long for companies to
| care at this time, in particular if productivity keeps
| increasing. And it's completely unclear what the state of the
| art will be in 20 years; the problem might mostly solve
| itself.
| johnjwang wrote:
| To be clear, we still hire engineers who are early in their
| careers (and we've found them to be some of the best folks on
| our team).
|
| All the same principles apply as before: smart, driven, high
| ownership engineers make a huge difference to a company's
| success, and I find that the trend is even stronger now than
| before because of all the tools that these early career
| engineers have access to. Many of the folks we've hired have
| been able to spin up on our codebase much faster than in the
| past.
|
| We're mainly helping them develop taste for what good code /
| good practices look like.
| criddell wrote:
| > we still hire engineers who are early in their careers
|
| That's really great to hear.
|
| Your experience that a new engineer equipped with modern
| tools is more effective and productive than in the past is
| important to highlight. It makes total sense.
| startupsfail wrote:
| More recent models are not without drive and are not stupid
| either.
|
| There's still quite a bit of a gap in terms of trust.
| dgb23 wrote:
| AI might play a role here. But there's also a lot of economic
| uncertainty.
|
| It's not long ago when the correction of the tech job market
| started, because it got blown up during and after covid. The
| geopolitical situation is very unstable.
|
| I also think there is way too much FUD around AI, including
| coding assistants, than necessary. Typically coming either
| from people who want to sell it or want to get in on the
| hype.
|
| Things are shifting and moving, which creates uncertainty.
| But it also opens new doors. Maybe it's a time for risk
| takers, the curious, the daring. Small businesses and new
| kinds of services might rise from this, like web development
| came out of the internet revolution. To me, it seems like
| things are opening up and not closing down.
|
| Besides that, I bet there are more people today who write,
| read or otherwise deal directly with assembly code than ever
| before, even though we had higher level languages for many
| decades.
|
| As for the job market specifically: SWE and CS (adjacent)
| jobs are still among the fastest growing, coming up in all
| kinds of lists.
| ikiris wrote:
| Much like everything in the economy currently, externalities
| are to be shouldered by "others" and if there is no "other"
| in aggregate, well, it's not our problem. Yet.
| polskibus wrote:
| I think the bigger problem, that started around 2022 is much
| lower volume of jobs in software development. Projects were
| shutdown, funding was retracted, even the big wave of
| migrations to the cloud died down.
|
| Today startups mostly wrap LLMs as this is what VCs expect.
| Larger companies have smaller IT budgets than before
| (adjusted for inflation). This is the real problem that
| causes the jobs shortage.
| geekraver wrote:
| Same, mine is about to graduate with a CS masters from a
| great school. Couldn't get any internships, and is now
| incredibly negative about ever being able to find work, which
| doesn't help. We're pretty much looking at minimum wage jobs
| doing tech support for NGOs at this point (and the current
| wave of funding cuts from Federal government for those kind
| of orgs is certainly not going to help with that).
| MoonGhost wrote:
| With so many graduates looking for a job why don't they
| bang together and do something. If not for money then just
| to show off their skills, something to put in the resume.
|
| It's not going to get any easier in next next few years, I
| think. Till the point when fresh grad using AI can make
| something valuable. After that it will be period when
| anybody can just ask AI to do something and it will find
| soft in its library or write from scratch. In long terms,
| 10 years may be, humanity probably will not need this many
| developers. There will be split like in games industry:
| tools/libs developers and product devs/artists/designers.
| With the majority in second category.
| gitremote wrote:
| > With so many graduates looking for a job why don't they
| bang together and do something. If not for money then
| just to show off their skills, something to put in the
| resume.
|
| Young people are already doing that, but a lot of what
| they produce is what you expect from people who have no
| prior experience in designing and testing software for
| production environments.
| conn10mfan wrote:
| also they need to pay rent
| atonse wrote:
| I feel for your daughter. I can totally see how tools like
| this will destroy the junior job market.
|
| But I also wonder (I'm thinking out loud here, so pardon the
| raw unfiltered thoughts), if being a junior today is
| unrecognizable.
|
| Like for example, that whatever a "junior" will be now, will
| have to get better at thinking at a higher level, rather than
| the minute that we did as juniors (like design patterns and
| all that stuff).
|
| So maybe the levels of abstraction change?
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers..., where do you
| think the senior engineers you need in the future will come
| from?
|
| This problem might be new to CS, but has happened to other
| engineers, notably to MechE in the 90's, ChemE in 80's,
| Aerospace in 70's, etc... due to rapid pace of automation and
| product commoditization.
|
| The senior jobs will disappear too, or offshored to a
| developing country: Exxon (India 152 - 78 US)
| https://jobs.exxonmobil.com/ Chevron (India 159 - 4 US)
| https://careers.chevron.com/search-jobs
| MoonGhost wrote:
| > The senior jobs will disappear too
|
| Golden age of software development will be over soon?
| Probably, for humans. How cool is it, the most enthusiastic
| part will be replaced first.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Probably already is over, I would say since the start of
| the first post-COVID layoffs. Like compare the current
| average pay in tech including inflation to what was
| offered like 5 years ago.
|
| 2015-2022 was peak, downhill from there and it doesn't
| look like it'll recover.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| i think there's an opportunity here
|
| a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a
| senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend
| API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but
| doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom
|
| same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at
| writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the
| tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior
| engineer skill
|
| with the LLMs current ability to help people research a
| topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code,
| my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn
| senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior
| engineer
|
| convincing management of that is another story, though. if
| you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's
| probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out
| how to not eat the seed corn
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Graduating as a junior is just not enough in a more
| competitive market like there is now. I don't think it is
| related to anything else. If you can hire a developer that is
| spending 10x time coding or a developer that has studied and
| graduated, this is not much of a choice. If you don't have
| the option than you might go with a junior
| mhitza wrote:
| > It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of
| postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.
|
| That's been the case for most of the last 15 years in my
| experience. You have to follow local job markets, get in
| through an internship, or walk in at local companies and ask.
| Applying en mass can also help, and so does having some code
| on GitHub to show off.
| dalemhurley wrote:
| We have seen this in other industries and professions.
|
| As everything is so new and different at this stage we are in
| a state of discovery which requires more senior skills to
| work out the lay of the land.
|
| As we progress, create new procedures, processes, and
| practices, particularly guardrails then hiring new juniors
| will become the focus.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in
| the future will come from?
|
| I know this isn't what you want to hear, but what makes you
| think senior engineers will be in short supply in "the
| future"?
|
| I'm not even a developer (anymore, I was in the past), I'm a
| product manager, and I'm pretty sure I can see the point in a
| few years where not just developers but people like me get
| disintermediated. My customers have a semi-reasonable grasp
| of what they're looking for, and they can speak. In a few
| years -- ten at the _absolute most_ -- my customers will say
| to an AI, "I need an application that does XYZ" and the AI
| will reply, "Are you sure about that? Most people who say
| they need XYZ end up using an app that does WXY." My (former)
| users will reply, "Let's try it my way and see what happens."
| And the AI will say, "Okay, here are three popular UI styles,
| which do you prefer?" etc. etc.
|
| We're headed for Interesting Times.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| The junior engineers on my team are just supercharged and
| their job is different from when I was a junior engineer.
|
| I would say: ten years ago there was a huge shortage of
| engineers. Today, there is still lots of coding to be done,
| but everyone is writing code much faster and driven people
| learn to code to solve their own problems
|
| Part of the reason it was so easy to get hired as a junior
| ten years ago was because there was so much to do. There will
| still be demand for engineers for a little while and then
| it's possible we will all be creating fairly bespoke apps and
| I'm not sure old me would call what future me does
| "programming".
| knuppar wrote:
| Being quite blunt, just a cs degree from a good school has
| not been enough for quite some time. Research experience, OSS
| contribs, some specialty (ML, compilers, ...) are a must. I
| don't find this to be a problem, since it dilutes the value
| of an ivy league education.
|
| On top of that, you need to be really sharp at leetcode for
| any large-ish company.
|
| I find the "ai tools are junior engineers" narrative flawed,
| but it has any way accelerated the higher and higher
| expectations for a junior.
| richardw wrote:
| Your kid with a set of AI's is going to blow the greybeards
| out of the water in a few years. They learn and iterate a lot
| faster. They just accept the latest tech as a given.
|
| - greybeard who is trying his hardest to keep up
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that we're probably in a recession
| at the moment, due to US Executive policies which the tech
| industry largely disagrees with, and over which it has little
| influence.
| ouraf wrote:
| Don't shoot the messenger. He's just sharing his experience
| with the tool and using an anecdotal example.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| This may be unpopular/counter-intuitive to say, but in a
| capitalist world this is probably the best outcome IF (and
| I'm not saying I can predict the future) we expect the
| profession to die/be obsolete from a society POV - in such a
| world restricting juniors before they commit a whole career
| to that profession and invest too much resources into it is
| actually the outcome we probably want. Better than the
| alternative of even more mass unemployment later. If that's
| the case then giving people that info early, and avoiding
| more hiring/training now stops potential mal-investment of
| money and people's time into training/hiring/building careers
| in/etc.
|
| It stops juniors investing their life/time/energy in a field
| that is shrinking and that will increasingly "not be worth
| it" w.r.t effort put in given their longer time horizon. This
| is how capitalism when working correctly can obsolete jobs
| somewhat charitably - it does it by closing the door on entry
| level jobs ideally when people have little to lose and
| haven't yet invested a lot of their life into it. For example
| they may still be young enough to re-train; or may be
| dismayed from entering the field due to disruption/chatter
| and so do something more appropriate in the new world.
|
| Being hired in a sinking and increasingly more competitive
| field may actually be considered a "winner's curse" outcome,
| in that you will be in a industry highly competitive that is
| slowly sinking and is stressful with low opportunities for
| pay rises compared to other industries/skill sets - this is
| definitely playing your career in "hard mode". Most of all
| you will feel your skills, and value is useless relatively to
| people who got into more jobs with more scarcity playing life
| in "easy mode" with less stress and anxiety. In a few years
| time people getting into other fields may feel they "dodged a
| bullet" comparing themselves to others that did.
|
| Being able to pivot while you are still young and ageism
| isn't a barrier yet is definitely something to consider
| remembering careers these days are multi-decades long. I feel
| for your kid now, and I do for mine, but I would rather than
| try something different in their 20's vs say their 40's when
| they have a mortgage, a family to feed, and/or other
| commitments and ageism makes it harder to pivot/re-train into
| another career. I don't wish my kids to feel the anxiety I
| and many people I know are feeling later in life especially
| for a career that requires constant effort to maintain and
| keep relevant in. I'm not recommending my kids learn what I
| do at all for example.
| arewethereyeta wrote:
| By the rate at which these things advance I would say the
| "Seniors" will come from there too. We are transforming into
| architects or going at higher levels at least. Teach your
| kids to be better architects instead, code is dying. My 2c at
| least
| inkyoto wrote:
| > _My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes
| after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts_.
|
| I am utterly perplexed with the current situation on the job
| market, which seems to be a global phenomenon that is not
| constrained to a particular country or region. Late last
| year, I was hiring for two junior software engineering
| positions and (through an external recruitment partner) we
| received over 400 job applications for two junior positions.
| We, however, scrambled to narrow the number of candidates
| down to ten, out of which eight turned out to be lemons and
| two ended up being exceptionally good. 390 other applicants
| ended up being pure white noise.
|
| Colleagues in a neighbouring business unit reported receiving
| over 600 submissions for a single position.
|
| I have approached a few headhunters in the last couple of
| months with informal questions about what has been happening.
| They are under constant duress, receiving hundreds upon
| hundreds of applications for pretty much any position. The
| feedback is that when most people see a job ad, they put
| their resume through GenAI and submit whatever garbage comes
| out of it without even looking at the output. The vast
| majority of people can't even be bothered to write a simple
| cover letter, which could have been used as a shibboleth for
| the hiring manager / recruiter: <<I am an intelligent human
| being, and I am real>>.
|
| Naturally, the headhunters have responded with GenAI-assisted
| tools to sift through piles of putrid trash. The side effect
| is that such good, qualified applicants do not usually get a
| chance to get screened in.
|
| The situation does not seem to be changing, and the only way
| out seems to be applying through a professional network or
| connections. People abusing GenAI are hurting themselves
| (ironically, GenAI has become pretty good at recognising
| GenAI-generated content), and they are also hurting pretty
| much everyone else in the process, and they do not care.
| baq wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons meets Shannon's entropy and channel
| capacity. Noise floor got raised so high information can't
| pass through. Personal connections make it possible to
| communicate out of band.
|
| If this goes on for longer a wework for applicants might be
| an opportunity.
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| A junior engineer can always become a senior engineer by
| using Gemini/ChatGPT to build full systems and literally
| asking chatGPT, a series of Why questions to every output.
|
| In fact not being bottle necked by senior engineers or not
| having to drawe the luck of a bad senior engineer/mentor,
| there will be a new stars of Junior engineers.
|
| What you should be worried is Senior Engineers who hate AI
| baq wrote:
| Nothing to worry about IME. It takes one or two tasks which
| AI surprisingly (for them) solves and these guys turn
| around fast. If they're religiously against ai, tough luck
| them.
| eru wrote:
| > If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of
| things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in
| the future will come from?
|
| Hasn't this been a common refrain whenever someone found a
| way to automate any menial task in any job?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you aren 't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds
| of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need
| in the future will come from?_
|
| Cynical answer for the immediate future: maybe from the pool
| of existing seniors and principals that have all been stuck
| doing a faux-management job onboarding, mentoring and
| managing the juniors who were the only ones actually writing
| any code in many tech companies? It's a reversal of a trend,
| for sure: my feeling about the market until the last year or
| two, was that there's hardly any job for seniors or above,
| that isn't just management without the title and its
| privileges.
|
| Past the immediate future, if we end up replacing juniors
| with LLMs, then the next cohort of "seniors" will need to
| come from some kind of vocational training.
| api wrote:
| Our company predates AI and still doesn't make much use of
| it. It's not that useful for what we do. We have never had a
| junior engineering position open. Nothing we do is junior
| enough. There are literally no jobs in the company doable by
| someone with less than 5-10 years experience minimum.
|
| This is a very valid concern that predates AI by decades. AI
| just makes it worse. How will we raise the next generation of
| experts when there is no entry level of anything? We have
| either outsourced or automated everything below mid career
| level.
|
| This is an area that I agree with some on the nationalist
| right -- at least about the diagnosis, but not about the
| cure. If we continue down this road we end up with abandoned
| generations struggling to pay bills beneath an entrenched
| gerontocracy. If we do crack any kind of real age reversing
| life extension this could get really dystopian, like bad
| cyberpunk movie stuff, where you have generations of the
| impoverished beneath a pickled elite that never dies and owns
| everything.
| whiddershins wrote:
| I would like to take this moment to point out that in NY it
| is ~illegal for me to hire an unpaid intern and train them by
| for example saying: - this is codex, here is a bunch of
| tickets - enter each ticket into codex, then review each
| change and understand what it did. if you think what it did
| is good, open a PR - twice a day we will meet and i will
| review all the codex PRs with you and explain what is and
| isn't working
|
| etc.
|
| This would _not_ save me time. It would be paying it forward.
| And I cannot do this.
| runako wrote:
| > Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits
| (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently
| without context juggling.
|
| This is also part of a recent update to Zed. I typically use
| Zed with my own Claude API key.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or
| creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are
| they all sharing the same work tree?
| runako wrote:
| As far as I know, they are sharing a single work tree. So I
| suppose that could get messy by default.
|
| That said, it might be possible to tell each agent to
| create a branch and do work there? I haven't tried that.
|
| I haven't seen anything about Zed using containers, but
| again you might be able to tell each agent to use some
| container tooling you have in place since it can run
| commands if you give it permission.
| _bin_ wrote:
| I believe cursor now supports parallel tasks, no? I haven't
| done much with it personally but I have buddies who have.
|
| If you want one idiot's perspective, please hyper-focus on
| model quality. The barrier right now is not tooling, it's the
| fact that _models are not good enough for a large amount of
| work_. More importantly, they 're still closer to interns than
| junior devs: you must give them a ton of guidance, constant
| feedback, and a very stern eye for them to do even pretty
| simple tasks.
|
| I'd like to see something with an o1-preview/pro level of
| quality that isn't insanely expensive, particularly since a lot
| of programming isn't about syntax (which most SotA modls have
| down pat) but about _understanding_ the underlying concepts, an
| area in which they remain weak.
|
| Atp I really don't care if the tooling sucks. Just give me
| really, really good mdoels that don't cost a kidney.
| quantumHazer wrote:
| CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs)
| says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.
| hintymad wrote:
| It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of
| engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our
| minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace
| exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group
| contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to
| replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are
| impacted most so far.
|
| Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute
| to open source as time goes by?
|
| P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software
| engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but
| in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of
| knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some
| basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the
| current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.
|
| My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or
| expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we
| will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers
| may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for
| years to come.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us
| software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative
| work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic
| job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and
| interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations.
| Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing
| this type of work.
|
| Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type
| of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most
| of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out.
| Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing
| compositions.
|
| There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a
| prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I disagree. AI have shown to most capable in what we
| consider creative jobs. Music creation, voice acting,
| text/story writing, art creation, video creation and more.
| roflyear wrote:
| If you mean create as in literally, sure. But not in
| being creative. AI can't solve novel problems yet. The
| person you're replying to obviously means being creative
| not literally creating something.
| crat3r wrote:
| What is the qualifier for this? Didn't one of the models
| recently create a "novel" algorithm for a math problem?
| I'm not sure this holds water anymore.
| roflyear wrote:
| "After a couple of million suggestions and a few dozen
| repetitions of the overall process"
|
| How much of it is brute force?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Are we maybe moving the goalposts here? How much of human
| creativity is brute force?
| genewitch wrote:
| Marble sculptures, that's what I came up with.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You can't say AI is creating something new but that it
| isn't being creative with clearly explaining why you
| think that's the case. AI is creating novel solution to
| problems humans haven't cracked in centuries. I don't see
| anything more creative than this.
| roflyear wrote:
| > AI is creating novel solution to problems humans
| haven't cracked in centuries
|
| Really?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > AI have shown to most capable in what we consider
| creative jobs
|
| no it creates shit thats close enough for people who are
| in a rush and dont care.
|
| ie, you need artwork for shit on temu, boom job done.
|
| You want to make a poster for a bake sale, boom job done.
|
| Need some free music that sounds close enough to be
| swifty, but not enough to get sued, great.
|
| But as an expression of creativity, most people cant get
| it to do that.
|
| Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| > AI creates novel algorithms beating thousands of
| googlers.
|
| Random HNer on an AI post one day later
|
| > Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.
|
| It's so ridiculous at this point that I can just laugh
| about this.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Two people from different backgrounds have differing
| opinions on different systems.
|
| This just in, the response was also to an entirely
| different context.
|
| > rowanG077: Holy shit look how different the opinions
| are! LOL HN is so wild.
| brookst wrote:
| Serious deja vu to the late 70's and early 80's when
| "real musicians" said exactly the same thing about
| synthesizers and drum machines.
| krapp wrote:
| The difference, of course, being that synthesizers and
| drum machines are instruments that require actual skill
| and talent and can be used to express the unique musical
| style of an artist, whereas AI requires neither skill nor
| talent, and it cannot generate anything with actual
| artistic direction, intent or innovation, much less a
| unique creative style.
|
| AI is never going to give the world a modern Kraftwerk or
| Silver Apples or Brian Eno. The best an AI "artist" can
| do is have the machine mimic them.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Look, in the hands of a skilled artist, generative fill
| is really useful.
|
| In the same way that the synth is superstitious is
| banging.
|
| Sampling, when in the hands of a legend is also
| spectacular, see the prodigy and a break down of the
| samples they used. (or any half decent hiphop band)
|
| Then you get akon who just sped up a single sample put a
| beat on it and shat out some halfarsed shit.
| electrondood wrote:
| > doing the basic job of knowledge workers
|
| If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk
| is any task that involves taking information input (text,
| audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some
| information output or perform some action which is useful.
|
| That's basically the definition of work. It's not just
| knowledge work, it's literally any work.
| lispisok wrote:
| As much as I support community developed software and "free
| as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into
| tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits
| for others. Your comment is just one example of that.
|
| For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in
| private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a
| business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a
| license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody
| is violating your license before you can even think about
| doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets
| ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.
| hintymad wrote:
| > "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking
| people to work for free for huge financial benefits for
| others
|
| I'm quite conflicted on this assessment. On one hand, I was
| wondering if we would get better job market if there were
| not much open-sourced systems. We may have had a much
| slower growth, but we would see our growth last for a lot
| more years, which mean we may enjoy our profession until
| our retirement and more. On the other hand, open source did
| create large cakes, right? Like the "big data" market, the
| ML market, the distributed system market, and etc. Like the
| millions of data scientists who could barely use Pandas and
| scipy, or hundreds of thousands of ML engineers who
| couldn't even bother to know what semi positive definite
| matrix is.
|
| Interesting times.
| brookst wrote:
| Protect you from what?
|
| What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code
| to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are
| you worse off?
|
| I've never understood this mentality. It seems very zero
| sum and kind of anti social. I've built a couple of
| businesses, and there's always economic or technical
| precedent. I honestly don't mind paying it forward if
| someone can benefit from side projects I enjoyed doing
| anyways.
| computerex wrote:
| Exactly. If you are not actively going to compete in that
| space why not let someone else compete instead using your
| work?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your
| code to build a business, as compared to not doing so?
| How are you worse off?
|
| This someone might be someone I dislike. It would cause
| me some mild annoyance that they benefited from my
| effort.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| So let's say your side project improves your life by 5
| happiness points. You have two options:
|
| --- OPTION A - Keep your project private.
|
| * You get five happiness points.
|
| --- OPTION B - Make your project public.
|
| * Other individuals may get a small number of happiness
| points.
|
| * A megacorp might turn your project into a major product
| without compensating you and get a million happiness
| points.
|
| * You get five happiness points.
|
| ----------
|
| In either scenario, you still end up with five happiness
| points. If you release your code, other people may get even
| more happiness points than you, which isn't really fair.
| But you are no worse off, and you've increased humanity's
| total wealth of happiness points.
| lispisok wrote:
| You really dont see why somebody wouldnt like a megacorp
| to take their hard work, use it to make a billion
| dollars, dont see a cent themselves, while struggling to
| buy a house in this very unaffordable housing market?
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/total-happiness-in-the-
| world-...
| mullingitover wrote:
| Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Red Hat, etc. are huge
| players in open source, they probably contribute
| significantly more hours of work in building and
| maintaining major open source projects than the
| hobbyists.
|
| Not that hobbyists don't contribute, but these models are
| certainly being trained on the work of salaried engineers
| as much as their trained on hobbyists' spare time
| projects.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| This assumes that none of the effects of making a project
| public or private have any impact on the output of your
| personal utility function, which may be true for you
| personally, but certainly cannot validly be assumed to be
| generally true.
| blibble wrote:
| > Does this mean people will be less incentivized to
| contribute to open source as time goes by?
|
| personally, I completely stopped 2 years ago
|
| it's the same as the stack overflow problem: the incentive to
| contribute tends towards zero, at which point the plagiarism
| machine stops improving
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Now do open science.
|
| More generally, specialty knowledge is valuable. From now on,
| all employees will be monitored in order to replace them.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| > From now on, all employees will be monitored in order to
| replace them.
|
| This is going on a t-shirt.
| username223 wrote:
| > Does this mean people will be less incentivized to
| contribute to open source as time goes by?
|
| Yes. I certainly don't intend to put any free code online
| until I can legally bar AI bros from using it without
| payment. As Mike Monteiro put it long ago, "F** you, pay me"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)
| sagarpatil wrote:
| https://www.augment.new/ has a similar feature (it uses sonnet
| 3.7) and I'm really impressed by it. Worth trying out.
| manmal wrote:
| In the presentation, they highlighted that the changes it makes
| are minimally invasive. That sounded as if it's less prone to
| going on vision quests, like Claude often does. Is that
| something you've observed as well?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| What kind of Junior devs are you people hiring that you still
| need to do a lot of work to get it production ready?
|
| I work with Junior devs. They are Junior in that they have to
| be pointed in the direction they must work, and would be out of
| their depth in guiding the implementation of major features.
| But simple code changes are pretty fine.
|
| LLMs are useful, I kind of like them as code assistants, but
| they are very far of being even a Junior dev in terms of
| actually performing work.
| tough wrote:
| can someone give me a test prompt to one-shot something in go for
| testing?
|
| (Im trying something)
|
| what would be an impressive program that an agent should be able
| to one-shot in one go?
| blixt wrote:
| They mentioned "microVM" in the live stream. Notably there's no
| browser or internet access. It makes sense, running specialized
| Firecracker/Unikraft/etc microkernels is way faster and cheaper
| so you can scale it up. But there will be a big technical
| scalability difficulty jump from this to the "agents with their
| own computers". ChatGPT Operator already does have a browser, so
| they definitely can do this, but I imagine the demand is orders
| of magnitudes different.
|
| There must be room for a Modal/Cloudflare/etc infrastructure
| company that focuses only on providing full-fledged computer
| environments specifically for AI with forking/snapshotting
| (pause/resume), screen access, human-in-the-loop support, and so
| forth, and it would be very lucrative. We have browser-use, etc,
| but they don't (yet) capture the whole flow.
| ushakov wrote:
| we offer this with E2B Desktop
|
| Demo: https://surf.e2b.dev
|
| SDK: https://github.com/e2b-dev/desktop
| thundergolfer wrote:
| It's not our only focus at Modal but it's a big focus![1] Code
| agents are the killer use case for LLMs right now, and this
| complements our GPU inference and training capabilities.
|
| I'm quietly betting that agents increase the leverage of
| deterministic, reproducible devbox tech (eg. Nix, lockfiles,
| package mirroring), and this will end up being a huge win for
| us human engineers too.
|
| 1. https://modal.com/use-cases/sandboxes
| sudohalt wrote:
| When it runs the code I assume it does so via a docker container,
| does anyone know how it is configured? Assuming the user hasn't
| specified an AGENTS.md file or a Dockerfile in the repo. Does it
| generate it via LLM based on the repo, and what it thinks is
| needed? Does it use static analysis (package.json, requirements
| txt, etc)? Do they just have a super generic Dockerfile that can
| handle most envs? Combination of different things?
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think they mentioned it was a similar environment to what it
| trains on, so maybe they have a default Dockerfile. Of course
| containers can also install additional packages or at least
| python packages.
| nkko wrote:
| Yes, and one test failed as it missed pydantic dependency
| hansonw wrote:
| More about that here!
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/codex#advanced-configuratio...
| sudohalt wrote:
| Thanks!
| sudohalt wrote:
| It seems LLMs are doing a lot of the heavy lifting figuring
| out the exact test, build, lint commands to run (even if the
| AGENTS.md file gives it direction and hints). I wonder if
| there are any plans to support user defined build, test, and
| pre commit commands to avoid unnecessary cost and keep it
| deterministic. Also wonder how monolith repos (or distinct
| but related repos) are supported, does it run everything in
| one container or loop through the envs that are edited?
|
| I assume one easy next step is to just run GitHub Actions in
| the container since everything is defined there (assuming the
| user set it up)
| bionhoward wrote:
| What about privacy, training opt out?
|
| What about using it for AI / developing models that compete with
| our new overlords?
|
| Seems like using this is just asking to get rug pulled for
| competing with em when they release something that competes with
| your thing. Am I just an old who's crowing about nothing? It's ok
| for them to tell us we own outputs we can't use to compete with
| em?
| piskov wrote:
| What the video: there is an explicit switch at one of the steps
| about (not) allowing to train on your repo.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| That's nice. And we trust that it does what it says
| because...? The AI company (openai, anthropic, etc) pinky
| promised? Have we seen their source code? How do you know
| they don't train?
|
| Facebook has been caught in recent DOJ hearings breaking the
| law with how they run their business, just as one example.
| They claimed under oath, previously, to not be doing X, and
| then years later there was proof they did exactly that.
|
| https://youtu.be/7ZzxxLqWKOE?si=_FD2gikJkSH1V96r
|
| A companies "word" means nothing imo. None of this makes
| sense if i'm being honest. Unless you personally have a
| negotiated contract with the provider, and can somehow be
| certain they are doing what they claim, and can later sue for
| damages, all of this is just crossing your fingers and hoping
| for the best.
| tough wrote:
| On the other hand you can enable explicit sharing of your
| data and get a few million free tokens daily
| wilg wrote:
| If you don't trust the company your opt-out strategy is
| much easier, you simply do not authorize them to access
| your code.
| ofirpress wrote:
| [I'm one of the co-creators of SWE-bench] The team managed to
| improve on the already very strong o3 results on SWE-bench, but
| it's interesting that we're just seeing an improvement of a few
| percentage points. I wonder if getting to 85% from 75% on
| Verified is going to take as long as it took to get from 20% to
| 75%.
| Snuggly73 wrote:
| I can be completely off base, but it feels to me like
| benchmaxxing is going on with swe-bench.
|
| Look at the results from multi swe bench - https://multi-swe-
| bench.github.io/#/
|
| swe polybench - https://amazon-science.github.io/SWE-PolyBench/
|
| Kotlin bench - https://firebender.com/leaderboard
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| I kind of had the feeling LLMs would be better at Python vs
| other languages, but wow, the difference on Multi SWE is
| pretty crazy.
| ofirpress wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by benchmaxxing but we think there's
| still a lot of useful signals you can infer from SWE-bench-
| style benchmarking.
|
| We also have SWE-bench Multimodal which adds a twist I
| haven't seen elsewhere:
| https://www.swebench.com/multimodal.html
| Snuggly73 wrote:
| I mean that there is the possibility that swe bench is
| being specifically targeted for training and the results
| may not reflect real world performance.
| kristianp wrote:
| Maybe a lot of the difference we see between peoples comments
| about how useful AI is for their coding, is a function of
| what language they're using. Python coders may love it, Go
| coders not much at all.
| mr_north_london wrote:
| How long did it take to go from 20% to 75%?
| nadis wrote:
| In the preview video, I appreciated Katy Shi's comment on "I
| think this is a reflection of where engineering work has moved
| over the past where a lot of my time now is spent reviewing code
| rather than writing it."
|
| Preview video from Open AI:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhdpnbfH6NU&t=878s
|
| As I think about what "AI-native" or just the future of building
| software loos like, its interesting to me that - right now -
| developers are still just reading code and tests rather than
| looking at simulations.
|
| While a new(ish) concept for software development, simulations
| could provide a wider range of outcomes and, especially for the
| front end, are far easier to evaluate than just code/tests alone.
| I'm biased because this is something I've been exploring but it
| really hit me over the head looking at the Codex launch
| materials.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| > rather than looking at simulations
|
| You mean like automated test suites?
| tough wrote:
| automated visual fuzzy-testing with some self-reinforcement
| loops
|
| There's already library's for QA testing and VLM's can give
| critique on a series of screenshots automated by a playwright
| script per branch
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Cool. Putting vision in the loop is a great idea.
|
| Ambitious idea, but I like it.
| tough wrote:
| SmolVLM, Gemma, LlaVa, in case you wanna play with some
| of the ones i've tried.
|
| https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm
|
| recently both llama.cpp and ollama got better support for
| them too, which makes this kind of integration with
| local/self-hosted models now more attainable/less
| expensive
| tough wrote:
| also this for the visual regression testing parts, but
| you can add some AI onto the mix ;)
| https://github.com/lost-pixel/lost-pixel
| ericghildyal wrote:
| I used Cline to build a tiny testing helper app and this
| is exactly what it did!
|
| It made changes in TS/Next.js given just the boiletplate
| from create-next-app, ran `yarn dev` then opened its mini
| LLM browser and navigated to localhost to verify
| everything looked correct.
|
| It found 1 mistake and fixed the issue then ran `yarn
| dev` again, opened a new browser, navigated to localhost
| (pointing at the original server it brought up, not the
| new one at another port) and confirmed the change was
| correct.
|
| I was very impressed but still laughed at how it somehow
| backed its way into a flow the worked, but only because
| Next has hot-reloading.
| fosterfriends wrote:
| ++ Kind of my whole thesis with Graphite. As more code gets AI-
| generated, the weight shifts to review, testing, and
| integration. Even as someone helping build AI code reviewers,
| we'll _need_ humans stamping forever - for many reasons, but
| fundamentally for accountability. A computer can never be held
| accountable
|
| https://constelisvoss.com/pages/a-computer-can-never-be-held...
| hintymad wrote:
| > A computer can never be held accountable
|
| I think the issue is not about humans being entirely
| replaced. Instead, the issue is that if AI replaces enough
| number of knowledge workers while there's no new or expanded
| market to absorb the workforce, the new balance of supply and
| demand will mean that many of us will have suppressed pay or
| worse, losing our jobs forever.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That is true regardless of whether there is or isn't a "new
| or expanded market to absorb the workforce".
|
| It's a crucial insight that's usually missed or eluded in
| discussions about automation and workforce - unless you're
| literally at the beginning of your career, losing your
| career to automation screws you over big time, forever. At
| best, you'll have to downsize your entire lifestyle, and
| that of your family, to be commensurate with your now
| entry-level pay. If you're halfway through the career that
| suddenly ended, you won't recover.
|
| All the new jobs and markets are for the kids. Mind you,
| not _your_ kids - your kids are going to be disadvantaged
| by their household being suddenly thrown into financial
| insecurity or downright poverty, and may not even get a
| chance to start a good career path with their peers.
|
| That, not "anti technology sentiment", is why Luddites
| smashed the looms. Those were people who got rug-pulled by
| business decisions and thrown into poverty, along with
| their families and communities.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Re:simulation Deebo does this for debugging:
| https://github.com/snagasuri/deebo-prototype
| klabb3 wrote:
| > a lot of my time now is spent reviewing code rather than
| writing it.
|
| Reviewing has never been a panacea. It's a best-effort at
| catching obvious mistakes, like a second opinion. Only with
| highly rigorous tests can reviewing give as high confidence as
| I trust another engineer or myself. Generally cadence of code
| output has never been a bottleneck for me, rather the opposite
| (if I had more time I'd write you a shorter letter).
|
| Most importantly, writing code that is testable on meaningful
| boundaries is an extremely difficult and delicate art form,
| which ime is something you really want to get right if
| possible. Not saying an AI can or can't do that, only that it's
| the hardest part. An army of automated junior engineers still
| can't win over the complexity beast that yolo programming
| causes. At some point code mutations will cause more problems
| as side effects than what they fix.
| csomar wrote:
| > I think this is a reflection of where engineering work has
| moved over the past where a lot of my time now is spent
| reviewing code rather than writing it.
|
| This was always true. Front-End code is not really code. Most
| of the back-end code is just convert and moving data around.
| For most functionality where you need "real code" like crypto,
| compression, math, etc.. you use a library used by another 100k
| developers.
| DGAP wrote:
| If you still don't think software engineering as a high paying
| job is over, I don't know what to tell you.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| It's high paying?
| Reubend wrote:
| It might be over in the future, but it's still fine for the
| next few years at the minimum.
| asdev wrote:
| is the point of this to actually assign tasks to an AI to
| complete end to end? Every task I do with AI requires atleast
| some bit of hand holding, sometimes reprompting etc. So I don't
| see why I would want to run tasks in parallel, I don't think it
| would increase throughput. Curious if others have better
| experiences with this
| nmca wrote:
| with a bad ai it is pointless, with a good ai it is powerful.
|
| codex-1 has been quite good in my experience
| masterj wrote:
| The example use-cases in the videos are pretty compelling and
| much smaller scope.
|
| "Here's an error reported to the oncall. Give a try fixing it"
| (Could be useful even if it fails)
|
| Refactor this small piece I noticed while doing something else.
| Small-scoped stuff that likely wouldn't get done otherwise.
|
| I wouldn't ask LLMs for full-features in a real codebase but
| these examples seem within the scope of what they might be able
| to accomplish end-to-end
| sagarpatil wrote:
| I am working with a 3rd party API (Exa.ai) and I hacked
| together a python script. I ran a remote agent to do these
| tasks simultaneously (augment.new, I'm not affiliated, I have
| early access)
|
| Agent 1: write tests, make sure all the tests pass.
|
| Agent 2: concert python script to fastapi
|
| Agent 3: create frontend based on fastapi endpoints
|
| I get a PR, I check code and see if it works and then merge to
| main. All three PR's worked flawlessly (front end wasn't
| pretty).
| RhysabOweyn wrote:
| I believe that code from one of these things will eventually
| cause a disaster affecting the capital owners. Then all of a
| sudden you will need a PE license, ABET degree, 5 years working
| experience, etc. to call yourself a software engineer. It would
| not even be historically unique. Charlatans are the reason that
| lawyers, medical doctors, and civil engineers have to go through
| lots of education, exams, and vocational training to get into
| their profession. AI will probably force software engineering as
| a profession into that category as well.
|
| On the other hand, if your job was writing code at certain
| companies whose profits were based on shoving ads in front of
| people then I would agree that no one will care if it is written
| by a machine or not. The days of those jobs making >$200k a year
| are numbered.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Even ads have risk. Customer service has risk. The widespread
| proliferation of this stuff is a legal minefield waiting to be
| stepped on.
| lispisok wrote:
| I wish but I dont think we could be any futher away from
| professionalizing like engineering/law/accounting/medicine.
| There was a deliberate effort to flood the field and lower
| salaries and developers were so full of hubris and thought
| there was infinite demand for their labor and went along with
| it and still are. Maybe some are learning given the job market
| the last few years.
|
| Despite software being in everything and harm to the public due
| to bad software has materialized every developer seems
| vehemently against professionalizing. Do you want a surgeon
| that went to surgeon bootcamp because "you dont need all those
| years in medical school to learn how to remove an appendix"? Do
| you even want an accountant who went to accountant bootcamp to
| do your taxes?
| RhysabOweyn wrote:
| Obviously there is no way to really predict when this would
| happen, but I don't think it will be up to developers to
| decide whether it happens or not. In Texas for example, the
| legislature forced engineering to be professionalized (or
| regulated) in an emergency session after a school in a well
| off area exploded in a gas explosion (https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/New_London_School_explosion#In...).
|
| I also do not think this is limited to software engineering.
| Medical doctors and accountants have faced the squeeze in
| recent years too. There are tons of (bad) DO med schools
| opening up across the country that will be flooding the field
| before long, nurse practitioners and physicians assistants
| get to do more and more work that only doctors got to do, and
| more and more accounting is being offshored. The question is
| when things get so bad that even the powerful decide to
| actually do something about it.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Is this the same idea as when we switched to multicore machines?
| The rate of change on the capabilities of a single agent has
| slowed enough now the only way for OpenAI to appearing to be
| making decent progress is to have many?
| ionwake wrote:
| Im sorry if Im being silly, but I have paid for the Pro version,
| $200 a month, everytime I click on Try Codex, it takes me to a
| pricing page with the "Team Plan"
| https://chatgpt.com/codex#pricing.
|
| Is this still rolling out? I dont need the team plan too do I?
|
| I have been using openAI products for years now and I am keen to
| try but I have no idea what I am doing wrong.
| mr_north_london wrote:
| It's still rolling out
| ionwake wrote:
| Thx for the reply, Im in london too ( atm )
| jdee wrote:
| im the same, and it appeared for me 2 mins ago. looks like its
| still rolling out
| ionwake wrote:
| cool it appeared - I wa sjsut worried it was a payment issue.
| thanks guys.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| They do this with every major release. Never going to
| understand why.
| hintymad wrote:
| I remember HN had a repeating popular post on the the most
| important data structures. They are all the basic ones that a
| first-year college student can learn. The youngest one was
| skiplist, which was invented in 1990. When I was a student, my
| class literally read the original paper and implemented the data
| structure and analyzed the complexity in our first data structure
| course.
|
| This seems imply that the software engineering as a profession
| has been quite mature and saturated for a while, to the point
| that a model can predict most of the output. Yes, yes, I know
| there are thousands of advanced algorithms and amazing systems in
| production. It's just that the market does not need millions of
| engineers for such advanced skills.
|
| Unless we get yet another new domain like cloud or like internet,
| I'm afraid the core value of software engineers: trailblazing for
| new business scenarios, will continue diminishing and being
| marginalized by AI. As a result, we get way less demand for our
| job, and many of us will either take a lower pay, or lose our
| jobs for extended time.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| I am so damn tired of all the AI garbage shoved down our throats
| every day. Can't wait for all of it to crash and burn.
| jetsetk wrote:
| At some point the bubble will pop
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| Higher chance of AGI/most SWEs being out of a job for an
| extended period of time than the bubble popping imo.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Agree with this. It's so strange to me that out of the all
| the anti-AI arguments one can derive, the anti-AIers have
| settled on riding with the "it's useless" argument, when
| it's plainly one of the most useful tools created since the
| desktop computer.
| Collisteru wrote:
| These people remind me of the people in the late 19th
| century who were scared of electricity because they
| thought it could remove all the air from rooms and
| suffocate people.
| greatpostman wrote:
| Way higher chance
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Reading these threads its clear to me people are so cooked and no
| longer understand (or perhaps never did) understand the simple
| process of how source code is shared, built, and merged together
| with multiple editors has ever worked
| swisniewski wrote:
| Has anyone else been able to get "secrets" to work?
|
| They seem to be injected fine in the "environment setup" but
| don't seem to be injected when running tasks against the
| enviornment. This consistently repros even if I delete and re-
| create the enviornment and archive and resubmit the task.
| bmcahren wrote:
| So there's this thing called "Setup Scripts" but they don't
| explicitly say these are equivalent to AWS Metadata and
| configured inside of Codex web interface - not a setup.sh or a
| package.json preinstall declaration. I wasted several hours (and
| lots of compute where Codex was as confused as I was) trying to
| figure out how to convince codex to pnpm install.
| gpeal wrote:
| Codex engineer here. Can you elaborate on what was confusing? I
| would love to make it more clear.
| rahulyc wrote:
| I didn't realize the setup script had to be done in the UI
| over in the environment tab. I assumed it would be reading
| something like setup.sh from the codebase.
|
| Docs could make that more clear
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I really wish they'd add support for Gitlab or better any
| arbitrary git repo.
| eru wrote:
| Well, Microsoft bought GitHub and Microsoft sort-of co-owns
| OpenAI, too.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| "23 SWE-Bench Verified samples that were not runnable on our
| internal infrastructure were excluded."
|
| What does that mean? Surely this should have a bit more
| elaboration. If you're just excluding a double digit number of
| tasks in the benchmark as uncompleted, that should be reflected
| in the scores.
| solresol wrote:
| I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I just wasted several
| hours wrestling codex to make it behave.
|
| Here's my workflow that keeps failing: - it writes some code. It
| looks good a first glance - I push it to github - automated tests
| on github show that there's a problem - go back to codex and ask
| it to fix it - it does stuff. It looks good again.
|
| Now what do I do? If I ask it to push again to github, then it
| will often create a pull request that doesn't include stuff from
| the first pull request, but it's not a pull request that stacks
| on top of the previous pull request, it's a pull request that
| stacks on top of main.
|
| When asked to write something that called out to gpt-4.1-mini, it
| used openai.ChatCompletion.create (!?!!?)
|
| I just found myself using claude to fix codex's mistakes.
| csomar wrote:
| I think you need to run the tests locally before you push the
| PR. I actually think you need to (somehow?) make this part of
| the generation process before Codex proposes the changes.
| bargainbin wrote:
| I have this issue with Devin. Given my limited knowledge of how
| these work, I believe there is simply too much context for it
| to take a holistic view of the task and finish accordingly.
|
| If both OpenAI and Devin are falling into the same pattern then
| that's a good indication there's a fundamental problem to be
| solved here.
| fcoury wrote:
| I upgraded to Pro just because of Codex and I am really not
| impressed. Granted, I am using rust so that may be the issue
| (or skill issue on my end too).
|
| One of the things I am constantly struggling with is that the
| containers they use are having issues to fetch anything from
| the internet: error: failed to get `anyhow` as
| a dependency of package `yawl-core v0.1.0 (/wor
| kspace/yawl/core)` Caused by: download of
| config.json failed Caused by: failed to
| download from `https://index.crates.io/config.json`
| Caused by: [7] Could not connect to server (Failed to
| connect to proxy port 8080 after 30 65 ms: Could not connect to
| server)
|
| Hopefully they fix this and it gets better with time, but I am
| not going to renew past this month otherwise.
| hmottestad wrote:
| You can specify a startup script for your environment in the
| Edit -> adbvaned section. The code placed there will run
| before they cut off the internet access. Also worth noting
| that it uses a proxy stored in $http_proxy.
|
| Took me an few hours today to figure out how to install maven
| and have it download all the dependencies. Spent an hour
| trying to figure out why sudo apt-get update was failing, it
| was because I was was using sudo!
| bearjaws wrote:
| I spend maybe $20 a month on Claude code, $200 a month is hard to
| swallow.
|
| I don't understand why OAI puts their alpha release products
| under a $200 a month plan instead of just charging for tokens.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| My weird theory: the alpha releases are more expensive than
| people realize, and OpenAI can afford to launch money-losing
| alphas on Pro because few users have Pro accounts and the lose
| less money per Pro user.
|
| If anyone could use Codex, you'd want to price the tokens at a
| rate where you don't lose money, or at least not too much
| money. If you price the tokens too high, then not only are
| people not using Codex, but customers and investors alike begin
| to lose faith, they no longer "feel the AGI".
| zrg wrote:
| I've been experimenting with providers offering similar
| functionality for the last year and it is really vastly superior
| experience this codex like approach than cursor, devin etc
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